Timothy Snyder, a famous American historian, warns that Russia is waging two parallel wars, a classic one in Ukraine and an invisible propaganda one in Europe and the United States, designed to make people believe that Moscow is invincible and that any help to Kiev is useless, reports EFE. com quoted by Rador Radio Romania.

“The best option for Russia is to surrender to the Americans and Europeans and stop supporting Ukraine,” Snyder explains in an interview with the EFE agency in Vienna after participating in the Security Conference in Munich.

“Ukrainians will not give up. They may be defeated, but they will not give up. We are the ones who can give up. We can convince ourselves that it doesn’t help. And there are people in our political systems who say that. But our help is of great importance,” he says.

The historian, author of the books Lands of Blood: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, The Road to Unfreedom and On Tyranny, has established himself as an influential voice in the discourse on freedom, democracy and authoritarianism. in the last decade.

Snyder believes that one of the fronts of the war is the one that Russian propaganda is developing in “the minds of Europeans and Americans” to make them believe that military aid will not bring any benefit, that the fate of Ukraine is decided.

“What worries me is that we in the West, without being directly involved, take our state of mind for reality. And this is important, because there are people in Russia who are trying with all their might to influence our mood,” he explains.

“Ukrainians can win if their allies do not betray them. They won’t win this week or next month, but they can win if they get support,” says the historian, who has traveled to Kyiv several times and met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Known for his ability to predict events such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s “neo-fascist” drift, or Donald Trump’s danger to American democracy, Snyder combines his role as a historian with an active engagement with Ukraine.

The Yale professor, who spends part of the year in Vienna as a researcher at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), has raised more than $1 million for Ukraine’s anti-drone system, and his online courses on the country’s history have been successful. millions of views on YouTube.

Snyder recalls in an interview that most wars in recent decades have been lost by the strongest country: this is the pattern of wars of decolonization, and also what is seen in the defeat of the United States in Vietnam and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

“If Russia was truly invincible, unstoppable, it would not need to engage in this propaganda. They would have defeated Ukraine a long time ago, but since the Ukrainians resisted, they need to convey this message to the minds of Americans and Europeans,” he explains.

The historian does not hide his displeasure with the fact that the minority of the US Republican Party, the most Trumpist wing, welcomes the victory of Russian President Vladimir Putin in Ukraine.

Although the death in prison of Russian opponent Oleksii Navalny has shocked many American politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, he believes that aid to Ukraine is unlikely to make progress in the House of Representatives.

Therefore, he assures, Joe Biden’s administration will have to look for creative formulas for further support of Ukraine. “And the Europeans will have to do more than they have done,” he adds.

With Navalny dead and Putin’s other most prominent opponent, Volodymyr Kara-Murza, in prison, Snyder believes the Russian women’s movement to return soldiers from the front could pose problems for the Kremlin.

“I also think they’re getting to a point where it’s going to be harder for them to mobilize men because they’re reaching demographics that have been protected until now, like the urban middle class,” he says.

But overall, Snyder points out, there is a wide gap in the real situation within Russia, and therefore plenty of room for the unexpected, as seen in the failed coup of Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin.

“The best way to help Russia, to make changes in Russia, is for Ukraine to win the war. And this is what even the Russians who oppose Putin tell you,” the historian concludes, EFE.com reports, as quoted by Rador Radio Romania.