Timothy Snyder, the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale, closes his course on Ukrainian history by tying together a century of imperial and post-imperial experience. He argues that Ukraine's existence as a society and polity had to precede the collective resistance that began on 24 February 2022, and works backward from that claim to ask what makes a modern nation emerge at all. The lecture traces how Polish, Russian, and Jewish self-understanding are bound up with experiences in Ukrainian lands, and revisits the country's position at the center of Soviet and Nazi terror as a lens on both systems. Snyder closes by weighing whether Ukraine's post-colonial, multilingual makeup is a relic of the past or a model with wider relevance. Part of his full Yale lecture series on Ukrainian history, delivered with the same synthetic, argument-driven style as the rest of the course.