Timothy Snyder doesn’t waste time on diplomatic hedging. Sitting down with me at Vienna’s Institute for Human Sciences, where he’s been a permanent fellow since 2008, the historian laid out a case that runs against almost everything the headlines suggest: that both Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine and Donald Trump’s war in Iran are being fought by leaders who cannot win them, and know it.
The War Russia Won’t Admit It’s Losing
Kyiv has just endured some of the worst missile bombardment of the entire war. It would be easy to read that as strength. Snyder reads it as the opposite.
„Russia’s losing in every conventional sense,“ he told me. „It can’t advance. It’s losing more soldiers than it can possibly replace. So what they’re trying to do is convince the Ukrainians and the West that they’re capable of doing terrible things, and therefore we should compromise.“
He’s blunt about who’s paying for that terror campaign. „The Russians can only do this because we’re buying their natural gas and oil,“ he said, a point he returned to more than once. Europe, Austria included, isn’t a bystander in this war; it’s still, in his telling, one of its funders.
What makes Putin’s position worse, Snyder argues, is timing. Moscow spent 2023 and 2024 selling its own public a story: that the war was stalling only because of Western support for Kyiv, and that a friendlier voice in Washington would fix everything.
„Their guy Trump is now in power, and they’ve continued the war, and the Americans are now essentially out of it,“ Snyder said. „But now Russia has to face the reality that they’re losing a war just to Ukraine. Putin would have been wiser to leave a year ago, two years ago, three years ago.“
This is why Snyder sees him as „superloser“. Putin removed his own excuse, and the war kept going badly anyway.
The War Trump Won’t End, Because He Might Not Want To
If Putin’s failure is slow motion, Snyder thinks Trump’s is fast becoming farce. The US president promised a swift war in Iran. Months later, it’s still going, and deeply unpopular.
„The idiocy with which we began this adventure in Iran is procedural idiocy as well,“ Snyder said. „As you try to build a tyranny, you cut yourself off from the very procedures which might have prevented you from doing ever more stupid things. He’s now in this problem that he can’t win the war, and it’s very unpopular, and it’s going on.“
Asked why Trump might keep a losing, unpopular war alive heading into the November midterms, Snyder doesn’t hesitate.
„He can keep the war going in the hope that the Iranians will carry out a terrorist attack on the territory of the US,“ he said. „The failure of democracy leads to a stupid war, but then the person who started the stupid war can use the stupid war to try to make democracy even worse.“
Snyder points to Hungary as a possible preview: days before April’s tight election, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán alleged a plot against a gas pipeline supplying the country, convening an emergency security meeting as he trailed in the polls. The opposition, and much of the commentary that followed, treated it as theatre. „That’s exactly it,“ Snyder said. „We talked about it ahead of time. And it’s 100% predictable that Trump will try to use it. But it’s also worth noticing: it’s his fault. It’s his government that started this war.“
What History Actually Says About the Small Guy
Underneath both wars, Snyder sees the same miscalculation: a belief that size wins wars. He argues history says otherwise.
„Since 1945, the smaller country has generally won,“ he said. „And since 1945, the anti-imperial country has generally defeated the imperial country. The United States loses wars all the time. Russia loses wars all the time. This notion that the bigger country always wins is contradicted by recent decades of history.“
None of which makes either war cheap. Snyder is careful never to let the „superloser“ framing slide into comfort. Asked what’s actually at stake for people living far from any front line, in Vienna, for instance, he doesn’t hesitate.
„The fact that you and I can have this normal interview in this peaceful room in this lovely city is a result of the Ukrainians resisting,“ he said. „If we let Ukraine lose, our entire world is transformed. The European Union breaks down. The world becomes much more a place where all that matters is money and the whimsy of people who have money.“
A Historian Unafraid of Activism
It’s this conviction that’s pushed Snyder past the usual boundaries of his profession. He’s raised money for Ukrainian defence and met President Zelensky directly, unusual territory for an academic, and he makes no apology for it.
„The fact that I’m a historian doesn’t mean that I can’t be a father, or that I can’t be a civil society activist,“ he told me. „These things go perfectly well together. In situations of crisis, whether it’s the collapse of democracy or the beginning of a criminal war of aggression, we all have certain things that we can bring to bear.“
Two wars, in Snyder’s account, fought by leaders who can’t actually win them. But the losing, he’s clear, doesn’t come free. Someone else is always the one paying for it.