Historian uses Canadian prize money to buy drones for Ukraine

*Originally published on May 15, 2024. 

In April of this year, Timothy Garton Ash collected his reward money for winning the prestigious 2024 Lionel Gelber Prize. 

Today, in Kyiv, the Oxford University professor presented what he bought with it — a new set of reconnaissance drones for immediate use in the war against Russia.

"We've built the best Europe we've ever had, the most free, the most prosperous, the most peaceful, and most united ever for millennia. But now it's really seriously under attack," Garton Ash told CBC IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed, explaining his decision on how he'd spend the prize money.

He said he chose the particular items to buy after consulting with the Come Back Alive Foundation, a non-profit Ukrainian organization dedicated to identifying the specific needs of particular troops and pairing them with international donors.

"Come Back Alive has been going since the beginning of the Russia-Ukrainian war in 2014," said Garton Ash. "And unlike the sort of big, unwieldy charity organizations, they know exactly which unit requires exactly which kit. You know, it's 'pick up trucks for these guys' or 'reconnaissance drones for these guys'. And for me, it was kind of important to know exactly what it was and where [the money] was going."

The $50,000 (CDN) Lionel Gelber Prize goes to what its jury identifies as the best book of nonfiction about international affairs published in English. Garton Ash won in 2024 for his book, Homelands: A Personal History of Europe.

"It's a book that took me just 50 years to write," he joked while accepting the award at the award ceremony, held at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy.

While the book recounts a love affair with the idea of European freedom, beginning with Garton Ash's travels during the 1970s when he saw a continent still largely dominated by dictatorships.

"The formative experience for me in Europe, apart from living in Germany in the 1970s, was really Eastern Europe. It was a meeting for dissidents in Eastern Europe and then the great solidarity movement in Poland," said Garton Ash.

In 1989, he was in Germany watching the Berlin Wall come down, at the beginning of what he calls the "post-Wall period," a deceptively peaceful interlude which he believes came to an end with Russia's invasion of Crimea in 2014.

Having observed the rise of democracy and liberalism across the continent, Garton Ash now grieves what appears to be a turning of the tide, with authoritarian-leaning governments such as that of Hungary's Viktor Orbán.

He makes the case that all-out victory for Ukraine should be the only acceptable outcome of the current war for other Europeans, based not only on duty to a fellow liberal democracy, but also on rational self-interest.

"Vladimir Putin wants to get the Russian Empire back, or as much of it as possible, and a hell of a lot of Russians support him in that," Garton Ash told Ayed.

"[Victory for Ukraine] is also in our vital self-interest. If he's not stopped in Ukraine, he'll push on."
 

Listen to the full conversation by downloading the IDEAS podcast from your favourite app.

*This episode was produced by Tom Howell.