I do not consider Snyder a worthwhile source on this particular topic. He has been the go-to academic pundit for a liberal mainstream that has been fixedly anti-Russia for more than a decade. He is one of the architects (a principal one, possibly) of the positioning of Putin as some kind of modern-day Hitler and as Russia more generally as a globally anti-Democratic force, manipulating everything from Brexit, to the rise of Trump, to police brutality against Black people with masterful shadow puppetry. So I do not trust him on this topic.
Specifically, his habit of focusing on the efforts and motivations of individual leaders as though they existed in a vacuum has been a source of critique.
Here’s a critique of his work from The Nation.
Re: his 2010 book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, which (incorrectly, IMO) relates the deadly regimes of Hitler and Stalin:
The conflation of Stalinist and Nazi crimes seemed morally righteous to some but grossly reductive to others. The somewhat arbitrary temporal and geographical framework omitted important episodes of political violence in the region; by conflating Nazi and Soviet tactics, Snyder elided important differences between them—most notably that the Nazis explicitly planned to exterminate certain ethnic groups, while Soviet violence was more complex in its aims and methods, and more varied in its results. Snyder was also criticized for focusing on the intentions and actions of a select group of political leaders while giving short shrift to the many other historical forces at play, such as the actions of local governments and populations.
Since then, he’s doubled-down on rhetoric that has fomented a post-2000 Red Scare, wherein Russia is the existential threat of our time; THE sole source of resistance against the inevitability of all world governments embracing liberal democracy, secretly responsible for the modern rise of the far-Right in many areas of the globe.
On this topic specifically, for instance, it’s weird that he hand-waves any geopolitical motivations on the basis that the actions make Russia more susceptible to China, as though the West is a benign and neutral force vis a vis Russia and it’s natural resources.
