Schopenhauer on suffering and Ukraine

Monday 23 February 2026

Arthur Schopenhauer never witnessed mechanised warfare, satellite reconnaissance or the bureaucratic choreography of modern armies. Yet his bleak meditations on human conflict, suffering and the structure of the will read today less like nineteenth-century pessimism and more like uncomfortable reportage. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, now stretching across years and generations of consequence, has provided a theatre in which Schopenhauer’s philosophy appears almost indecently relevant.

Schopenhauer’s starting point was simple and unforgiving. Human existence, he argued, is governed by the Will — a blind, ceaseless striving that drives individuals and states alike into competition, frustration and, ultimately, misery. History, in his view, is not a story of moral progress but a repetitive cycle of desire, collision and loss. When one considers the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it is difficult to avoid the sense that Schopenhauer is less a philosopher being applied than a mirror being held up.

At the core of the war lies an act of will masquerading as destiny. The Russian state, animated by an imperial self-conception and an unresolved trauma about its post-Soviet diminishment, asserted its desire over the sovereignty of another country. Schopenhauer would have recognised the pattern immediately. The will does not reason itself into conflict; it simply seeks satisfaction. When thwarted, it becomes violent. Ukraine’s insistence upon political autonomy, European integration and cultural self-definition represented, to Moscow, not merely a geopolitical irritation but an existential affront. Two wills collided — one seeking domination, the other survival.

For Schopenhauer, such collisions are inevitable precisely because human beings, and by extension political communities, are trapped within their own subjective experience of suffering. Each sees its own pain as absolute and its own desire as justified. The Russian narrative of grievance — NATO expansion, historical entitlement, alleged cultural unity — functions in this way. It is not that these claims withstand objective scrutiny; it is that, within the closed circuit of the will, they feel compelling enough to justify catastrophe.

Yet Schopenhauer was not blind to asymmetry. He understood that suffering is unequally distributed and that the will of the strong inflicts disproportionate misery on the weak. Ukraine’s experience since 2014, and catastrophically since 2022, embodies this imbalance. Cities reduced to rubble, families dismembered by displacement or death, and a civilian population compelled to reorder every aspect of daily life around sirens and funerals — this is suffering not as abstraction but as texture. Schopenhauer insisted that misery is the fundamental fact of existence, and Ukraine has been forced to live that truth at industrial scale.

There is a temptation, particularly in wartime rhetoric, to portray suffering as ennobling. Schopenhauer would have rejected this outright. Pain, he argued, does not confer moral elevation; it simply hurts. Heroism exists, but it does not redeem the structure that made it necessary. Ukrainian courage on the battlefield and resilience on the home front are undeniable, yet they do not make the war meaningful in any transcendent sense. They merely reveal the extraordinary capacities humans develop when the will leaves them no alternative.

Schopenhauer’s most unsettling contribution to understanding this war lies in his rejection of historical teleology. He did not believe that history bends towards justice or enlightenment. Each generation, he observed, repeats the same errors with improved tools. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is not a regression to a darker past; it is a modern manifestation of an ancient pattern. Precision missiles and digital propaganda have replaced cavalry and proclamations, but the underlying dynamic — the assertion of will through force — remains unchanged.

This perspective complicates many Western narratives. The idea that Ukraine’s suffering will inevitably produce a more stable or morally improved international order sits uneasily with Schopenhauer’s worldview. He would caution against the belief that war teaches lasting lessons. Even if Ukraine emerges victorious and secure, the will elsewhere will continue to seek its own satisfaction, armed with fresh resentments and revised justifications. The tragedy, for Schopenhauer, is not that humans fail to learn quickly enough, but that the structure of desire makes learning irrelevant.

And yet Schopenhauer was not a nihilist. His philosophy allows for limited escape from the tyranny of the will — through aesthetic contemplation, ethical compassion and, most significantly, the recognition of shared suffering. It is here that Ukraine’s experience acquires a moral dimension without slipping into romanticism. The extraordinary solidarity shown by Ukrainian society, and by those abroad who have offered genuine support rather than performative sympathy, reflects what Schopenhauer called Mitleid — compassion grounded not in ideology but in the recognition of oneself in the pain of another.

This is not sentimentality. It is, rather, a quiet resistance to the logic of domination. When Ukrainian volunteers rebuild destroyed homes, when medics continue their work under fire, when communities absorb displaced strangers as neighbours, they enact a refusal to allow suffering to fragment moral perception entirely. Schopenhauer would not claim that such acts abolish misery, but he would concede that they momentarily suspend the primacy of the will.

The Russian state’s conduct, by contrast, illustrates Schopenhauer’s darker insights into cruelty and self-deception. He argued that individuals and institutions often cloak their will in moral language to make its consequences bearable to themselves. The language of ‘liberation’, ‘historical unity’ and ‘defensive necessity’ serves precisely this function. It does not persuade those who suffer under its bombs, but it soothes those who authorise them. Schopenhauer would see this as neither exceptional nor uniquely Russian — merely a particularly lethal example of a universal habit.

Perhaps the most Schopenhauerian aspect of the war is its grinding persistence. There is no catharsis, no decisive moral reckoning. Instead, there is attrition — of lives, of infrastructure, of hope. Schopenhauer described existence as a pendulum swinging between pain and boredom. In Ukraine, the boredom has been replaced by exhaustion, but the rhythm remains. Even moments of respite are shadowed by anticipation of the next loss. This is not the dramatic suffering of epic tragedy; it is the banal misery of prolonged violence.

What, then, does Schopenhauer offer Ukraine, or those observing her struggle, beyond bleak confirmation? Not consolation in the usual sense. He offers clarity. To understand that this war is not an aberration in an otherwise improving world is to abandon certain illusions — but also to sharpen moral responsibility. If misery is endemic, then the ethical task is not to imagine its final abolition, but to reduce it where possible and to refuse participation in its unnecessary multiplication.

In this light Ukraine’s insistence on her own sovereignty acquires philosophical weight. It is not a claim to moral purity or historical destiny, but a demand to be spared the imposition of another’s will. Schopenhauer would recognise the modesty of this aspiration, and perhaps its dignity. To resist domination is not to deny the tragic structure of existence, but to assert, however briefly, a boundary against its worst excesses.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine thus stands as a grim confirmation of Schopenhauer’s vision — of the relentlessness of conflict, the ubiquity of suffering and the fragility of progress. Yet it also reveals, in fleeting but significant ways, the human capacity to recognise suffering in others and to act against it, even when history offers no guarantee of reward. In a world governed by will, such moments do not redeem the whole — but they matter all the same.