When the Yale W historian Timothy Snyder was asked by Ukraine's government to raise funds for the war effort, he considered a project to restore Chernihiv library. It would have been an obvious choice for the bestselling author, who has visited the ruined library - a gracious, Gothic terracotta structure that survived two world wars but was smashed to rubble in March by Russia's 500kg bombs.
Yet he soon decided that a fundraiser for a library would be "kind of morally self-indulgent".
When he asked his friends in Kyiv what was most urgently needed, nobody hesitated: anti-drone defences. "I thought I should do the thing which is most urgent now," Snyder tells the Guardian in a phone interview from the Yale campus in New Haven, Connecticut. "The ruins of the library are going to be there. I can raise money for that later.
This story is from the November 29, 2022 edition of The Guardian.
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This story is from the November 29, 2022 edition of The Guardian.
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