Sergey Maidukov is the author of “Life on the Run: One Family’s Search for Peace in War-torn Ukraine.” This article is adapted from the Substack “The First Person with Michael Judge.”
KYIV — The other day, my wife asked whether I had seen the Instagram link she had sent me earlier. I said yes, but I couldn’t remember what it was about. She couldn’t remember either. For a moment, we looked at each other with mild confusion.
I opened my phone again. The link was to a video from a recent Russian air raid on Kyiv. A drone had struck a residential building a few blocks from ours. A roar, a flash, black smoke pouring from the windows. The clip had already gathered hundreds of likes.
I didn’t press the button myself.
What exactly was I supposed to “like”? The explosion? The burning apartments? The possibility that someone had died there minutes earlier?
A terrifying, unforgettable sight. Yet I had forgotten it, and that disturbed me even more than the video itself. War has become a habit. First it stopped being news, then it stopped being a tragedy.
At the beginning of the war, Ukrainians lived entirely within it. Phones were checked every few minutes, even at night, when spouses woke each other with the glow of their screens. Nothing felt more important than news from the front, and each update arrived like an emotional shock.
Now, four years later, war has become background noise.
Air raid sirens barely interrupt life anymore. People glance toward the sky, check their phones, and continue drinking coffee, hurrying to work, arguing about prices, planning vacations. At night, during massive attacks, it can be different — we tense up, listening to explosions and engines overhead — but by morning ordinary life resumes while somewhere else bodies are still being pulled from rubble.
“Have you heard?”
“Oh yeah. Terrible. The bastards bombed the subway station. How am I supposed to get to work now?”
What once seemed unbearable has become routine — frontline reports skimmed somewhere between weather forecasts and exchange rates.
When I first saw wounded soldiers in the Kyiv hospital, I was so shaken that I spent several minutes in a daze. Nearly everyone was missing an arm or a leg. Some had bandages over their eyes. Others moved silently through corridors on crutches. There were so many of them, and most were so young — boys, really.
I saw a soldier sitting by himself in his wheelchair next to the window. He wore a black T-shirt with the Ukrainian trident and a pair of shorts. With both legs missing, he had a single prosthesis, giving him the appearance of a science-fiction cyborg.
He was talking to someone on the phone, his voice getting louder and angrier.
“Don’t even think about pitying me. I’m not whining, so you don’t whine, either. I’m alive and life goes on.”
For some time afterward, I couldn’t think about anything else. It felt like the first weeks of the war again — furious anger and impotent despair mixed together. Then gradually the impression faded.
Social media didn’t create this process, but it has accelerated and flattened it. The endless feed shatters the mirror of reality into pictorial splinters: a missile strike, a football goal, a meme, a recipe video, a political scandal, a burning building. Horror appears briefly, then vanishes beneath the next movement of a finger. And yes, we become distracted. Otherwise, the human mind simply could not endure.
We haven’t forgotten how to empathize. Our collective mind has instead developed something like anesthesia. It doesn’t heal the wound, but it allows us to endure the pain.
From the outside, citizens — unless they’re in frontline cities — look as if nothing special is happening in their country.
One can see this in the heart of Kyiv, in Independence Square, transformed into a kind of memorial to fallen soldiers. National flags flutter there, and beneath them stand small blue-and-yellow flags — one for each life given for Ukraine, thousands upon thousands of them.
A week ago, as I walked through the memorial, I noticed a man and a woman moving slowly among the flags, searching for a place to put theirs. They didn’t cry. They barely spoke. Their faces showed no obvious emotion. They were … focused. That was the right word. They were looking for a place for their flags, and it had to be the right place.
To avoid staring at them, I turned away and saw four young women taking photographs of each other against the backdrop of the square’s triumphal column. The girls laughed and struck playful poses — hands on hips, fingers pointing toward the column, one of them balancing on one leg for some reason.
My first thought was judgmental: How could these girls laugh and pose for photographs where other people were mourning the dead?
My second thought was that the soldiers probably would not have been offended. Perhaps this was exactly why they died — so that others could go on laughing, flirting, taking foolish photographs in the sun.
And then I thought this: War is when some die, others survive, and others simply go on living. The last group is always the largest. There is no justice in that. No mercy either. War is cruel and does not pretend otherwise.
And cruelty has a way of reproducing itself.
In Ukraine today, hatred toward Russia often extends far beyond the people actually responsible for the war. It spills outward, swallowing language, culture, names, even the dead. Leo Tolstoy Square in Kyiv has become Ukrainian Heroes Square. The Mikhail Bulgakov Museum exists under constant threat of closure. Nikolai Gogol is increasingly seen not as a great writer born on Ukrainian soil, but as a symbol of cultural betrayal.
Since the beginning of the war, hatred has remained one of the few things still binding together two nations that once called themselves brotherly.
After strikes on Ukraine, Russian social media is filled with comments celebrating dead Ukrainians: Kill them all. Burn them alive. They deserve it.
After Ukrainian drone raids inside Russia, similar reactions appear on our side. No mercy. Let them suffer too. The more the better.
This hatred comes not from soldiers in trenches but from ordinary people who have never seen one another, never held weapons, never expected to become part of a war. They experience it through glowing screens and celebrate the deaths of strangers.
Seneca wrote that hatred is revenge, unable to spend itself immediately, and so it thickens into something dark.
These dark emotions have become fuel for two war machines that have already collided and now spin in the bloody mud, their engines roaring, their wheels digging deeper with every attempt to move forward. Hatred burns inside them like fuel in an overheated engine.
The longer that fire burns, the less imaginable stopping becomes. People grow accustomed to pain, sacrifice and loss. Even the word “peace” sounds suspicious now, almost shameful.
Compassion toward the enemy now feels almost like treason.
This happened most clearly and catastrophically in Russia, where an entire culture has militarized itself from within. It began with lavish Victory Day parades and mothers carrying their babies inside cardboard tanks. It continues to this day with millions of Russians believing they are fighting in Ukraine against Nazis who want them exterminated. Hatred there today feels less like an emotion than like a civic duty.
Ukraine did not need propaganda to produce the people’s hatred. Russia supplied it — through Bucha, Mariupol, torture chambers, filtration camps and years of bombardment. Every missile striking a residential tower in Kyiv, every child pulled from rubble, every family erased in a single night has hardened Ukrainian anger into something durable, instinctive and unforgiving.
But should resistance really require us to mirror the ugliest impulses of the society attacking us? Military retaliation is necessary. Delight in civilian suffering is something else entirely. This is not a sermon about turning the other cheek. It is about preserving sanity.
If a society truly believes itself morally different from its enemy, then it must preserve that difference not only on the battlefield, but within its emotional core.
This was achieved by Igor Kozlovsky, a Ukrainian writer and religious scholar who spent almost two years in Russian captivity. I knew him in my youth, when we moved in some of the same circles, where he stood out for his gentle smile and quiet inner strength.
Half a century later, I stumbled upon his recorded lectures and interviews, and listened to them, captivated. I learned later that he had died of a heart attack. The 700 days he spent in prison had taken their toll.
But had he returned from captivity embittered? Did I ever hear him express hatred toward Russians? Hardly.
In one of the last recordings I heard, Igor spoke about love. He did not call for forgiving enemies or forgetting their crimes. He meant something else entirely.
“I remember the moment, after the first torture,” he said. “I was covered in blood, but I was smiling.” That was because he had two thoughts: First, he was no longer afraid to die. “The second thought was that I had to live, because I had love,” he said. “I love my family, those close to me, my children, my friends, my country. But the most important thing is that they love me… I am indebted to their love.” And so, “I must repay this debt of love, and that is why I must live.”
War does not deform only the aggressor. It reaches for everyone trapped inside it, trying to pull entire societies toward the same emotional abyss. It sinks beneath the surface, only to reappear later — in politics, families, schools, language, culture and the moral instincts of future generations.
The true winner of this war will not be the side that dictates peace terms or redraws borders. It will be the society that manages to preserve — or recover— more of its humanity afterward.
In the four years since Russia’s full-scale invasion, I have never once seen Ukrainian children playing war.
That may be our greatest victory.
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