In a Sept. 26, 2022 interview for PBS Frontline, Timothy Snyder explains that Putin fundamentally misunderstands people who live in democracies.

Timothy Snyder is a history professor at Yale University. He is the author of The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. He is an expert on the modern history of Central and Eastern Europe, with a special focus on the Holocaust.

Watch the full interview here: [ Ссылка ]

TRANSCRIPT OF THIS EXCERPT:

… Does Vladimir Putin understand Joe Biden? Does he understand what the American response will be? Does he also have an inability to understand what will happen if he invades Ukraine?

I think there’s a fundamental misunderstanding on the Russian side, on Putin’s side, of people who are used to living in democracies, because in some ways he’s right: We are slow; we’re complicated; the various forces inside our countries end up canceling each other out. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t points where a fundamental sense of decency is involved, and I think in, not just in American public opinion but in European public opinion, invading Ukraine crossed that line. It crossed that line for a lot of people.

And here you can take President Biden as a person, like other Americans, or like others who just thought, totally invading a country with the aim of wiping it out of existence is—crosses a line which is not a political line but was some kind of line of human decency. And I think it is a misunderstanding that Putin has about us, that we are just as cynical as he. I think that is a misunderstanding. I think it’s a fundamental misunderstanding.

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