When Retaliation Becomes a Way of Life: The Psychology of Endless War

On the morning of June 18, 2026, residents of Moscow's southeastern neighborhoods woke to the sound of Ukrainian drones crashing into an oil refinery four miles away. Black smoke hung over the city. Four airports closed. A shopping mall shuttered. Oil-slicked rain fell on playgrounds. A Moscow resident named Nikolai, standing at his window watching the plumes rise, described his neighbors walking outside asking, 'How is that possible?' He noted they could not yet connect Russia's invasion of Ukraine to the strikes landing on their city. 'It's like they were told for a long time not to look up,' he said, 'and now it's as if they have lifted their heads for the first time.'

That image — a population finally looking up at what their government has done in their name — contains the whole tragedy of prolonged war. Not the military strategy, not the drone counts (992 drones downed in a single day, according to Russia's Defense Ministry), not the territorial calculations. The tragedy is the psychological structure that makes wars like this one self-perpetuating: a structure built from fear, pride, and the specific deformation of the moral imagination that comes from years of curated hatred.

President Zelensky's statement that day — 'If Ukraine burns, then your Moscow will burn as well' — is not cynical. It is the logic of symmetrical suffering, the oldest and most human of war's justifications. It is also, from the standpoint of moral psychology, a closed loop with no exit.

The architecture of enmity

Aquinas, in the Summa Theologiae (I-II, q. 46), describes anger as a passion that arises from a perceived injury and seeks a response proportionate to the wrong suffered. Anger, in this account, is not intrinsically disordered — it can be the appropriate response to genuine injustice. But Aquinas also identifies what he calls ira per zelum becoming ira per vitium: the anger that is initially just, which calcifies over time into a habit of hostility that seeks not restoration but pure retaliation. At that point, the passion is no longer ordered to any good. It simply feeds itself.

What the Russia-Ukraine war has entered, after more than four years, is precisely this territory. Ukrainian drone strikes on Moscow's oil infrastructure have created fuel rationing across dozens of Russian regions. Russian missiles have struck the Pechersk Lavra monastery complex in Kyiv, one of Eastern Orthodoxy's holiest sites. Each strike is framed as a response to the prior strike. Russian hard-liners call for destroying Ukraine's 'entire industrial sector.' Zelensky frames the drone barrage as a direct answer to the monastery attack. The cycle has achieved something like its own momentum, independent of the political objectives that originally animated it.

This is what Vitz, Nordling, and Titus, in A Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person, identify as the Fallen dimension of human sociality: the tendency of wounded communities to organize their identity around the injury, so that the enemy becomes not just an adversary but a constitutive element of the self. Nations at war for years do not merely fight each other — they need each other, in a distorted sense, to know who they are.

A 20-year-old Moscow schoolworker described to reporters feeling genuinely frightened, while noticing that many colleagues were pretending nothing had changed. The school was building a shelter. Both responses — fear and denial — are what the CCMMP framework would call disordered movements of the sensitive appetite: fear that cannot be integrated into prudent action, and denial that refuses to let the concupiscible appetite register what is real. Both are failures of the cogitative sense, the faculty Benjamin Suazo describes as the power by which we perceive particular goods and dangers in their concrete specificity. When that faculty is suppressed by ideology or exhaustion, populations lose the capacity to reason about the actual costs of what is being done in their name.

The comfort trap in wartime psychology

C.S. Lewis wrote that comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it: 'If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth — only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair.'[^1] He was writing about religion, but the structure applies to war.

Russian state media's response to the drone strikes was to minimize them. Vladimir Solovyov, a state news commentator, told Russians not to panic and urged them to 'draw strength from family stories' of worse historical periods. The Moscow antiterrorism task force restricted publication of images from the attacks. A pro-war blogger was summoned by police for posting video of the oil refinery fire. The entire apparatus of the Russian state was organized, in the hours after one of the largest attacks of the war, around manufacturing comfort rather than confronting truth.

This is not merely propaganda strategy. It is a recognizable psychological pattern: the substitution of consoling narrative for accurate perception. The problem Lewis identifies is that this substitution produces not comfort but, eventually, despair — because soft soap cannot absorb real losses. When the oil runs short, when the airports close, when the smoke is visible from apartment windows, no state narrative is thick enough to cover the gap between the story and the experience.

Zelensky's explicit goal in the drone campaign is to make that gap undeniable — to force Russian society to confront what four years of managed perception has concealed. Whether that confrontation produces political pressure on Putin, or simply more fear and more nationalism, is the open strategic question. But the psychological mechanism is clear: he is trying to break the comfort trap from the outside, which is the bluntest possible instrument.

What peace requires that neither side is currently offering

Douglas Hyde, writing from his experience as a former Communist organizer, observed that genuine self-criticism — the kind that cuts through 'compliments and cant' to ask honestly whether a cause's purposes are being served — is extraordinarily rare in organized movements.[^2] The Communist campaigns he analyzed often declared victory at the moment of greatest internal failure, because the apparatus of the movement depended on morale. The honest question, 'What is all this really about, what is it really for?' was the question the movement least wanted to ask.

Both Russia and Ukraine are now inside that same structural problem. Russia cannot ask what the war is for without confronting the illegality and cost of the original invasion. Ukraine cannot ask what continued escalation is for without confronting the limits of what drone strikes on Moscow can actually achieve. Hard-liners on both sides — Gurulyov calling for 'striking mercilessly,' Zelensky warning that Moscow will burn — are not engaged in strategic analysis. They are performing the emotional logic of the war, because the emotional logic is all that is currently available.

The CCMMP framework, drawing on Aquinas and the tradition of moral theology, would locate the path out not in the absence of conflict but in the reordering of the passions toward a genuine good. Anger, in the Thomistic account, is ordered when it seeks restoration of justice rather than pure punishment of the enemy. Fear is ordered when it motivates prudent action rather than either paralysis or aggression. Pride — the deepest driver in national conflicts — is reordered when it is converted from a defense of the wounded ego into what Wojtyła, in Love and Responsibility, calls the capacity for self-gift: the willingness to spend one's strength for something larger than one's own vindication.

None of this is politically naive. It does not require that Ukraine abandon its territorial claims or that Russia escape accountability for the invasion. What it requires is that the human beings making decisions — in Moscow, in Kyiv, in Washington — be capable of asking what a just resolution actually looks like, rather than what the next escalation requires. That capacity is a moral one, not merely a strategic one. It depends on the reordering of the cogitative sense, the correction of the disordered passions, the recovery of prudence as the governing virtue of practical reason.

John of the Cross, writing about the passive purifications of the dark night, described a process in which the soul is stripped of its attachment to consolations — not because consolations are evil, but because attachment to them prevents the deeper union that is the soul's actual good. The political analogy is imperfect but not empty: nations attached to the consolation of national narrative, national pride, and the emotional satisfaction of retaliation cannot make the movement toward a peace that costs them something real.

The resident looking up

Nikolai, the Moscow resident watching the smoke rise from four miles away, described neighbors who 'can't put two and two together' — who feel anger and confusion but cannot connect the strikes on their city to the strikes their government has been making on Ukrainian cities for four years. He called himself 'a staunch opponent of Putin and the war' and said he had always believed that Russian aggression would eventually 'come back to haunt the country.'

That moment of looking up — of the gap between state narrative and experienced reality becoming too wide to deny — is where the psychological possibility of change begins. It is not sufficient for peace. It is not even close to sufficient. But it is the first movement of what the moral tradition calls metanoia: a turning, a reorientation of perception toward what is actually real.

The war that has now run longer than World War I will not end because when one side's drones are more sophisticated and numerous than the other's; this would just precipitate a hiatus. It will end, and end well, when enough human beings on both sides of the conflict recover the capacity to ask the questions Hyde identified as the hardest: What is this really about? What is it really for? Is the injury we are seeking to inflict proportionate to any good we can actually name?

Those are not weak questions. They are the hardest questions in political life, and the ones that retaliation, by design, prevents anyone from asking.

References

[^1]: C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 28: 'If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth — only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair.'

[^2]: Douglas Hyde, Dedication and Leadership, on the necessity of honest self-criticism: cutting through 'compliments and cant so that it is possible to see whether the purposes of your cause have really been served by the activities in which you have been engaged.'