(Yale-based historian Timothy Snyder is best known as the author of Blood Lands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, a book which profoundly enriched/jolted not a few readers’ understanding of “The Holocaust”, this reader’s included)
What European history really shows, and quite powerfully, is that in order to become, quote unquote, a ‘normal’ European country, you have to become post-imperial, [meaning] you have to lose your wars.
Snyder’s words, quoted immediately above and below, are from an article published in today’s Australian edition of The Guardian.
Russia wins by losing. Russia really needs to lose this war, and to lose it decisively. The whole colonial move towards Ukraine is a distraction, a substitute for the internal changes which Russia really has to make.
The full article is here.
(Bear photo copyright Doug Spencer. Taken in May 2015 in Alaska – a once-was Russian colony)