Trump is Russia’s “only chance of winning the war” — Snyder

He said this in an interview with The Guardian.

Trump lost power in 2020, but will return to office on January 20, 2025. He has claimed he could end the war in Ukraine in a day, though most doubt this. Many expect him to quickly abandon Kyiv, but some hope he might be persuaded to maintain US support to push Zelenskyy to the negotiating table. Snyder, who has written extensively on Trump and Russia, is not optimistic about this outcome.

"I think the throughline for Trump, going all the way back to the 1980s and his visit to the Soviet Union, through his first presidential campaign and up to the present, has always been submissiveness towards the power in the Kremlin. I would be very happy for him to break with that. I don’t see any evidence of it yet.

The scenario is that Trump is made to understand that Vladimir Putin is bullying him and that Trump should therefore do the right thing. But so far in his entire career, Trump has seemed to enjoy being bullied by Putin. And so far [Trump’s] negotiating strategy for Ukraine, so far as they’ve revealed it, has not been to make Russia weaker, it’s been to make Ukraine weaker," Snyder said.

Snyder has said Trump is Russia’s "only chance of winning the war." He said so "because the Russians say it."

"A lot of the stuff where I’ve been right about Russia in the past has just been because I’ve been channeling what they say. And they’ve been saying for a year in their media that they need Trump to win. And I think the existence of Trump and the possibility that he would be president is itself a cause of this war, because [it] was something Russia could factor in the whole time. They could tell themselves: 'We just need to stay on the battlefield to January 25 and then the floodgates will open for us, because we’re going to have our guy.'

If Trump didn’t exist, if Trump had retired from politics, I think the whole Russian attitude towards this war would have been different. This war is strategically idiotic for them, as they must know. But the fact that Trump was there meant … they could always rationalize it. Just by existing, he’s extended this war," the historian emphasized.