Funded by a Ukrainian oligarch, the conference had become an occasional stopover for the gladhanding global elite. Snyder had come to speak at an annual conference, Yalta European Strategy (YES), which was founded in 2004 to promote ties with Europe. You could get a haircut at a barbershop, or hear standup at a comedy club, or sunbathe on the shores of the Dnieper River. Life, while not normal, was regaining some of its prewar rhythms. The first months of the war had gone relatively well for the Ukrainians – a fact that surprised many observers, but not Snyder – and by September, Kyiv was no longer in imminent danger of occupation. Air raid warnings blared from phones in pockets and handbags. There were sandbags everywhere, concrete roadblocks and steel “hedgehogs” designed to stop Russian tanks. On disembarking at the Kyiv-Pasazhyrskyi station, he found the city transformed by war. In the decades that followed, Kyiv had grown bigger and more interesting, and Snyder, who is now 53, had become an eminent historian of eastern Europe. Snyder knew the city well: he’d been visiting since the early 1990s, when he was a graduate student and the newly post-Soviet Ukrainian capital was dark and provincial. L ast September, seven months after Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Yale historian Timothy Snyder took a 16-hour train ride from Poland to Kyiv.
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