Timothy Snyder compares Russian grain blockade to Stalin's starvation tactics | DW News |

US historian Timothy Snyder has compared Russia's blockade of grain supplies from Ukraine with Stalin's terror of hunger.

"This is a disaster," said US historian Timothy Snyder of the situation in Ukraine. Speaking at DW's Global Media Forum, the contemporary historian and expert on Eastern Europe referred to Russia's grain blockade in the Black Sea as a policy resembling the Soviet period of Stalinism in the early 1930s.

He drew parallels to Stalin's terror of starvation in Ukraine, which claimed millions of lives. But at that time, Snyder said, there were no journalists drawing international attention to the famine. Russia's war of aggression will now lead to a new famine that will last for two years, Snyder warned.

Looking back in history

At the time, Stalin's terror regime also had an impact on Germany's Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, who invaded Soviet Ukraine during World War II.

"The famine in 1933 and 1932 was also an inspiration to Adolf Hitler, whose main goal was to control the fertile agricultural territory of Ukraine," Snyder said at the conference.

Ukraine's Holodomor of 1933 and the Maidan Revolution