Editor’s note: Timothy Snyder is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History and Global Affairs at Harvard University and author of “Bloodlands,” “Black Earth,” “On Tyranny” and the forthcoming “On Freedom.” The opinions expressed in this comment are his own. Read more at CNN Opinion.
This Thursday, Russia celebrates Victory Day, its commemoration of the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945. Internally, there is nostalgia. In the 1970s, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev created a victory cult. Putin’s Russia continued this tradition.
Out there, there is intimidation. We are supposed to think that Russia cannot lose.
And too many of us, during Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine, believed that. In February 2022, when Russia began its large-scale invasion of the neighboring country, the consensus was that Ukraine would fall within days.
Even today, when Ukraine has held on for more than two years, the prevailing view among Russia’s friends in the US Congress and Senate is that Russia must eventually win. Moscow’s success is not on the battlefield, but in our minds.
Russia could lose. And she must lose, for the sake of the world – and for her own sake.
Russian soldiers patrol the theater of battle in Mariupol, southeastern Ukraine, March 2022. (Alexander Nemenov/AFP/Getty Images)
The notion of an invincible Red Army is propaganda. The Red Army was formidable, but it was also beatable. Of the three most consequential foreign wars, the Red Army lost two.
It was defeated by Poland in 1920. It defeated Nazi Germany in 1945, after nearly collapsing in 1941. (Its victory in that case was part of a broader coalition and with decisive American economic assistance.) Soviet forces were in trouble in Afghanistan immediately before their invasion in 1979 and had to retreat a decade later.
And the modern-day Russian army is not the Red Army. Russia is not the USSR. Soviet Ukraine was a source of resources and soldiers for the Red Army. In that victory in 1945, Ukrainian Red Army soldiers suffered enormous casualties – greater than American, British and French losses combined. It was Ukrainians in disproportionate numbers who fought their war all the way to Berlin in the uniform of the Red Army.
Today, Russia is fighting not with Ukraine but against Ukraine. You are carrying out a war of aggression on the territory of another State. And it doesn’t have the American economic support – lend-lease – that the Red Army needed to defeat Nazi Germany. In this constellation, there is no particular reason to expect Russia to win. One would hope, on the contrary, that Russia’s only chance would be to prevent the West from helping Ukraine – by convincing us that its victory is inevitable, so that we do not apply our decisive economic power to the war.
The past six months confirm this fact: Russia’s small victories on the battlefield came at a time when the United States was delaying aid to Ukraine rather than providing it.
Today’s Russia is a new state. It has existed since 1991. Like Brezhnev before him, Russian President Vladimir Putin governs through nostalgia. It refers to the Soviet past and also the Russian imperial past. But the Russian Empire also lost wars. It lost the Crimean War in 1856. It lost the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. It lost World War I in 1917. Russia was unable to keep its forces on the ground for more than about three years in any of these three cases.
In the United States there is growing nervousness about a Russian defeat. If something seems impossible, we can’t imagine what happens next. And there is a tendency, even among Ukraine supporters, to think that the best resolution is a draw.
This type of thinking is not realistic. And it reveals, behind the nerves, a strange American concept.
No one can manage a war this way. And nothing in our past attempts to influence Russia suggests that we can exert that kind of influence. Russia and Ukraine are both fighting to win. The question is: who will win and what will be the consequences?
If Russia wins, the consequences are horrifying: a risk of an extended war in Europe, a greater likelihood of a Chinese adventure in the Pacific, the weakening of the international legal order generally, the likely proliferation of nuclear weapons, the loss of faith in democracy.
Soviet soldiers during a patrol in Kabul, April 25, 1988. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in late 1979 and remained in the country until 1989. (Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)
It is normal for Russia to lose wars. And, in general, this leads Russians to reflect and undertake reforms. Defeat in Crimea forced an autocracy to end serfdom. Russia’s defeat by Japan led it to experiment with elections. The Soviet failure in Afghanistan led to Gorbachev’s reforms and, consequently, the end of the Cold War.
Under the Russian particularities, History offers a more generic and even more reassuring lesson about empires. Russia is today fighting an imperial war. It denies the existence of a Ukrainian state and a Ukrainian nation, and carries out atrocities that recall the worst of Europe’s imperial past.
Today’s peaceful Europe consists of powers that lost their last imperial wars and then chose democracy. Losing your last imperial war is not only possible – it’s also good, not just for the world, but for you.
Russia can lose this war, and must lose this war, for the sake of the Russians themselves. A defeated Russia means not only an end to the senseless loss of young lives in Ukraine. It is also the only chance for Russia to become a post-imperial country, one where reform is possible, one where Russians themselves can be protected by law and able to cast meaningful votes at the polls.
The defeat in Ukraine is Russia’s historic chance of normality – as Russians who want democracy and the rule of law will say.
Like the United States and Europe, Ukraine celebrates the 1945 victory on May 8 instead of May 9. Ukrainians have every right to remember and interpret this victory: they suffered more than the Russians from the German occupation and died in enormous numbers on the battlefield.
And the Ukrainians are right to think that Russia today, like Nazi Germany in 1945, is a fascist imperialist regime that they can and must defeat. Fascism was dethroned last time because a coalition stood firm and applied its superior economic power. The same applies today.
