Sisyphus in Ukraine: Albert Camus and the Philosophy of Endless Resistance
By Matthew Parish
Saturday 24 October 2026
In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was condemned by the gods to an eternity of futile labour. His punishment was to push an enormous boulder up a steep mountainside, only for it to roll back down whenever he approached the summit. He would then descend the mountain and begin his labours again, without hope of completion or prospect of release. The punishment was ingenious in its cruelty because it combined physical exhaustion with the psychological torture of purposelessness. Sisyphus was not merely obliged to work forever. He was obliged to work forever in the certain knowledge that everything he achieved would ultimately be undone. It is difficult to contemplate this ancient parable without thinking of contemporary Ukraine, where an entire nation has spent years defending herself against Russian aggression, rebuilding what has been destroyed, burying those who have died and preparing herself for the next assault.
Yet there is something curious about the myth of Sisyphus. In 1942, at one of the darkest moments in modern European history, the French-Algerian philosopher Albert Camus published an essay entitled The Myth of Sisyphus, in which he argued that the apparently hopeless predicament of this unfortunate Greek hero might nevertheless contain the foundations of a meaningful human existence. Camus was writing during the Second World War, when France had been defeated and occupied by Nazi Germany, the prospects of European freedom appeared remote and the machinery of totalitarianism seemed capable of crushing every expression of human independence. It was an extraordinary moment to advance the proposition that an individual condemned to endless suffering might nevertheless discover happiness. But Camus was not advocating resignation. Quite the contrary: he was developing a philosophy of resistance which, although principally concerned with the absurdity of human existence, has a remarkable contemporary resonance for the Ukrainian people.
Camus began with the proposition that the human condition is fundamentally absurd. Human beings are creatures who insist upon discovering meaning, purpose and rational coherence in their lives, whereas the universe supplies no satisfactory answers to their enquiries. We are born without our consent, struggle to establish ourselves in a world indifferent to our ambitions and ultimately die, frequently without completing the projects that have occupied our lives. We seek justice but encounter injustice. We pursue happiness but discover suffering. We imagine that history progresses towards some rational destination, only to find that humanity is capable of repeating its most terrible mistakes with remarkable enthusiasm. The absurd arises from the confrontation between our demand that the world should make sense and its stubborn refusal to oblige us.
For Camus, the appropriate response to this predicament was neither religious consolation nor philosophical despair. He rejected the proposition that the apparent meaninglessness of existence justified abandoning life. Equally, he distrusted intellectual systems that promised to explain away human suffering by reference to some ultimate divine or historical purpose. Instead he advocated what might be described as conscious defiance: the determination to continue living, creating and struggling even when there is no guarantee that these activities will culminate in a final victory. Sisyphus becomes a philosophical hero precisely because he understands the hopelessness of his predicament and nevertheless continues. His consciousness of his circumstances deprives the gods of their ultimate power over him. They can compel his physical labour, but they cannot dictate the meaning he attaches to it.
Camus concluded his essay with one of the most celebrated and disconcerting sentences in twentieth-century philosophy: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” This was not a suggestion that suffering is inherently pleasurable, nor that endless labour is preferable to leisure. It was the more subtle proposition that human dignity lies partly in our capacity to determine our attitude towards circumstances we cannot control. The gods may have imposed the punishment, but Sisyphus possesses the freedom to refuse spiritual submission. His rock becomes his own because he chooses to confront it without illusion. The journey up the mountain may be futile in an objective sense, but the act of continuing becomes an affirmation of his existence.
The relevance to Ukraine is immediately apparent. Since Russia’s original invasion in 2014, followed by her vastly expanded assault in February 2022, Ukraine has endured a succession of military and civilian ordeals that frequently appear to repeat themselves. A village is liberated and subsequently attacked again. A bridge is reconstructed and then destroyed by a missile. An electrical substation is repaired, only to be struck by another wave of Russian drones. Soldiers establish defensive positions, repel an assault, count their casualties and prepare themselves for the next attack. Families flee their homes, return when conditions appear safer and sometimes discover that they must flee again. Every Ukrainian winter brings renewed anxiety about electricity, heating, water and the possibility that the ordinary infrastructure of civilised existence will be deliberately dismantled.
Indeed the resemblance has become particularly striking as the war has continued into the autumn of 2026. Russian attacks upon Ukrainian energy infrastructure have repeatedly deprived civilians of heat and electricity, while the approaching winter threatens to impose fresh hardships upon a population already exhausted by years of violence. The repair workers who restore damaged power installations resemble Sisyphus in a quite literal sense. Their work is essential, technically demanding and frequently dangerous, yet they must undertake it knowing that the same equipment may be destroyed again within days. The emergency physician treating the wounded after an air raid has no assurance that another raid will not produce another ward full of casualties. The teacher conducting lessons in an underground shelter must attempt to preserve the intellectual development of children whose futures have been placed in jeopardy by decisions taken hundreds of kilometres away in Moscow.
Nevertheless, there is an important difference between Sisyphus and the Ukrainians, and this distinction is central to understanding the moral significance of their resistance. Sisyphus has been condemned by supernatural powers to a punishment that is, by definition, eternal. Ukraine’s suffering is neither supernatural nor inevitable. It is the consequence of political decisions made by identifiable human beings, foremost among them Vladimir Putin. Russia has chosen to wage a war of territorial conquest and political subjugation against her neighbour. She could choose to cease that aggression. Ukraine’s predicament therefore has an identifiable cause, and although the means of ending it are uncertain, there is nothing metaphysically inevitable about its continuation.
This distinction matters because an excessively romantic interpretation of Camus could lead to the perverse conclusion that Ukrainians should somehow find fulfilment in the endless continuation of their struggle. Such a conclusion would be morally grotesque. There is nothing inherently ennobling about the destruction of a family home, the amputation of a soldier’s legs or the death of a child beneath the rubble of an apartment building. War may reveal courage, solidarity and ingenuity, but these virtues do not retrospectively justify the circumstances that made them necessary. The Ukrainian people are not fighting because perpetual struggle constitutes some desirable existential condition. They are fighting because the alternative may involve the destruction of their political independence, the suppression of their national identity and the subordination of their lives to the authority of an occupying power.
It is here that Camus’s later philosophical work becomes particularly illuminating. In The Rebel, published in 1951, he developed his philosophy of resistance beyond the solitary individual confronting the absurdity of existence. Rebellion, he argued, begins when a human being recognises that some demand made upon him is intolerable. The rebel declares that there is a boundary beyond which oppression cannot legitimately proceed. Yet this declaration also implies a recognition that other people possess the same dignity. Rebellion therefore establishes the foundations of solidarity. Camus expressed this idea through the proposition that individual resistance creates a collective moral community: the solitary assertion of human dignity becomes a shared refusal to submit.
This is perhaps the most important philosophical explanation of Ukraine’s extraordinary national mobilisation. Before February 2022, Ukraine was a politically contentious society, characterised by vigorous disagreements about corruption, language, regional identity, economic policy and the proper relationship between the state and its citizens. Her democratic institutions were imperfect, her political class frequently disappointing and her civil society often more effective than her bureaucracy. Yet Russian aggression transformed these disagreements by revealing a more fundamental common interest. Ukrainians who might have disagreed about almost every question of domestic politics discovered that they shared an unwillingness to be governed by Moscow. The rejection of an external aggressor became a foundation for national solidarity that no programme of administrative reform or patriotic education could have manufactured with comparable effectiveness.
The defence of Kyiv in the opening weeks of the full-scale invasion demonstrated this transformation. Russia’s military leadership appeared to anticipate that Ukrainian resistance would collapse under the psychological shock of overwhelming force. Instead the invasion produced an extraordinary mobilisation of soldiers, volunteers, local authorities and ordinary citizens. People who had spent their lives in occupations having little relationship to military affairs suddenly found themselves organising logistics, distributing food, transporting casualties, manufacturing defensive equipment and assisting the armed forces. Their actions were not necessarily inspired by a sophisticated political theory. They arose from the immediate recognition that the survival of their communities depended upon their willingness to act. In Camus’s terms, the revolt of individuals became the resistance of a people.
The same phenomenon remains visible in Ukrainian civil society. Charitable foundations, volunteer kitchens, medical evacuation teams and countless informal associations have assumed responsibilities that would ordinarily belong to government institutions. Their achievements have been particularly striking in frontline cities such as Kharkiv, where the demands of civilian life must be reconciled with the permanent possibility of renewed bombardment. These organisations rarely enjoy the luxury of planning their activities against a stable background. Their circumstances change unpredictably, resources fluctuate and the scale of human need often exceeds their capacity to respond. Yet their members continue working because the absence of any guarantee of success does not extinguish the obligation to attempt something useful.
Camus would probably have recognised these individuals as close relatives of the characters in his 1947 novel The Plague. Set in the Algerian city of Oran, the novel describes a community confronted by an epidemic that progressively transforms the ordinary assumptions of civilised existence. Its central figure, Doctor Bernard Rieux, confronts disease and death without entertaining illusions about his ability to abolish human suffering. He treats patients because they require treatment, not because he expects to establish a world in which nobody will ever fall ill again. His morality is founded upon practical decency rather than grandiose aspirations to heroism. For Ukrainians working in emergency medicine, humanitarian relief and the reconstruction of civilian infrastructure, this distinction should be immediately recognisable. One does not need to believe that suffering can be eliminated in order to believe that suffering ought to be alleviated.
There is also a darker political dimension to Camus’s philosophy that bears directly upon Russia’s conduct. Camus became increasingly suspicious of ideological systems that justified present cruelty by reference to supposedly inevitable historical outcomes. In particular, he rejected the proposition that violence could be rendered morally acceptable merely because its perpetrators claimed to be acting in accordance with the direction of history. His criticism of Soviet communism arose partly from his recognition that revolutionary movements could become tyrannical when they persuaded themselves that the achievement of some imagined future justified the destruction of actual human beings. For Camus, the greatest danger lay in the transformation of historical speculation into an excuse for unlimited political power.
Putin’s justification of Russian aggression provides a contemporary illustration of precisely this danger. His arguments frequently invoke interpretations of history in which Ukraine’s separate political existence is treated as artificial, Russian predominance as natural and the restoration of imperial influence as the fulfilment of some inherited historical destiny. Such arguments attempt to convert contested historical narratives into political obligations imposed upon living populations. Yet history possesses no independent will, and geographical proximity creates no moral entitlement to sovereignty over another people. The fact that two countries once belonged to the same empire does not establish that one has a perpetual right to govern the other. Indeed the essence of political freedom consists partly in the ability of successive generations to reject the institutions and allegiances imposed upon their predecessors.
There is a profound irony in the contrast between the Russian and Ukrainian approaches to history. Putin frequently presents himself as the agent of historical necessity, restoring an order that he regards as the proper arrangement of eastern Europe. Ukraine, by contrast, has been obliged to resist the supposed inevitability of that arrangement through the repeated exercise of human will. In philosophical terms, the Russian leadership seeks to escape the uncertainties of history by declaring its preferred interpretation to be destiny, whereas Ukrainians insist upon the freedom to create a future that history has not predetermined. Camus would surely have regarded the latter attitude as more consistent with his understanding of rebellion. Human dignity requires the possibility of refusing what powerful institutions insist is unavoidable.
Nevertheless, the comparison must not lead us into a simplistic division between virtuous resistance and the absence of moral difficulty. Camus was acutely aware that rebellion can corrupt itself when it adopts the unlimited methods of the tyranny it opposes. Resistance may require force, particularly against armed aggression, but the moral legitimacy of defence does not exempt its practitioners from the obligations of humanity. The treatment of prisoners, the protection of civilians, the proportionality of military action and the preservation of political freedoms remain meaningful considerations even during an existential war. A society defending itself against authoritarian aggression must be careful not to reproduce the authoritarian practices against which it is struggling.
This is not to suggest any moral equivalence between the aggressor and the victim of aggression. The distinction between initiating an unlawful war of conquest and resisting that war remains fundamental. Rather, it is to recognise that the ethical significance of Ukraine’s resistance depends partly upon the kind of society she seeks to preserve. If the ultimate objective is a democratic European state governed by law, then the institutions and practices of that state must remain worthy of defence. Legitimate public criticism, judicial independence, the exposure of corruption and respect for individual dignity cannot be treated indefinitely as dispensable luxuries. They are among the reasons for which resistance is justified in the first place.
Camus himself was not immune from the difficulties of reconciling abstract principles with the political conflicts of his time. His position during the Algerian struggle for independence exposed tensions between his opposition to political violence, his attachment to the land of his birth and his reluctance to endorse the full consequences of Algerian national self-determination. His critics accused him of allowing personal loyalties to compromise the universal implications of his philosophy. Whether or not that criticism is entirely fair, it reminds us that a philosopher’s principles must be tested against circumstances in which their application becomes uncomfortable. Camus provides a powerful intellectual framework for understanding Ukrainian resistance, but he does not supply a collection of infallible political answers.
Another difficulty arises from the psychological consequences of prolonged struggle. The mythology of Sisyphus is attractive precisely because its hero never collapses under the burden of his punishment. Real human beings are less conveniently constructed. Soldiers become exhausted, civilians lose hope and the repeated experience of bereavement can undermine even the strongest sense of national purpose. The language of resilience, although often justified, can become a subtle form of cruelty when it creates the expectation that victims of aggression must remain permanently cheerful, resourceful and grateful for the opportunity to demonstrate their fortitude. Ukrainians have already been required to display extraordinary courage. They should not additionally be required to pretend that their suffering constitutes a source of personal satisfaction.
There is a difference between the philosophical recognition that suffering need not destroy human dignity and the political expectation that suffering should be endured without complaint. Camus’s Sisyphus exercises an internal freedom that no external authority can extinguish, but this does not absolve those authorities from responsibility for the circumstances they impose. Ukrainian soldiers are entitled to exhaustion. Refugees are entitled to frustration. Families whose relatives have disappeared into Russian captivity are entitled to anger that no philosophical argument can conveniently dissolve. The proper response to these emotions is not to instruct their possessors in the principles of existentialism, but to recognise that the restoration of ordinary human life is the ultimate objective of the resistance.
Indeed this consideration raises uncomfortable questions for Ukraine’s international supporters. Western governments have repeatedly praised the courage and resilience of the Ukrainian people, sometimes with a rhetorical enthusiasm that exceeds their willingness to provide the resources necessary to reduce Ukrainian suffering. It is comparatively inexpensive to admire another nation’s determination. It is considerably more demanding to supply sufficient air defence systems, ammunition, financial assistance and industrial capacity to ensure that the burden of that determination does not become intolerable. There is a danger that the philosophical celebration of resistance becomes an excuse for leaving its practitioners to endure an unnecessarily prolonged ordeal.
The European response to Russian aggression must therefore be judged not merely by its declarations of solidarity, but by its practical contribution to altering the circumstances that compel Ukrainians to struggle. Every missile intercepted prevents some proportion of the destruction that would otherwise need to be repaired. Every effective defensive system reduces the possibility that soldiers will be required to fight again for territory previously secured. Every sustained commitment to reconstruction and economic stability provides civilians with some confidence that their sacrifices are directed towards a recognisable future. The purpose of international solidarity should not be to admire the spectacle of Sisyphus pushing his rock. It should be to help him reach the summit and prevent the rock from falling again.
Yet even here we encounter another complication. Wars are not always brought to satisfactory conclusions by the moral superiority or superior endurance of one party. History offers numerous examples of just causes that have failed and unjust regimes that have survived. Camus’s philosophy should therefore discourage an easy confidence that Ukraine must inevitably prevail because her cause is righteous. Such confidence merely replaces one form of historical determinism with another. Ukrainian success will depend upon military capabilities, economic endurance, political cohesion, technological adaptation and the decisions of foreign governments, as well as circumstances that cannot presently be predicted. A commitment to justice does not confer immunity from strategic miscalculation.
What Camus offers instead is a philosophy of action without guarantees. One resists not because victory is certain, but because submission would violate something essential to one’s understanding of human dignity. This is a demanding conception of moral responsibility. It allows neither the comfortable optimism of those who assume that history inevitably favours their preferred outcome nor the convenient pessimism of those who regard resistance as pointless whenever victory appears distant. The individual must act within the uncertainties of the world as it exists, rather than waiting for certainty that the world will reward his efforts.
Ukraine’s resistance has repeatedly demonstrated this principle. The successful defence of Kyiv was not predetermined by the balance of military resources at the outset of the invasion. The liberation of Kherson in November 2022 did not follow automatically from some universal principle that aggression must fail. These achievements were contingent results of planning, courage, organisational adaptation, Russian mistakes and the accumulation of countless individual decisions. Their historical significance lies partly in the demonstration that apparently overwhelming circumstances can sometimes be transformed by collective action. Sisyphus may possess no possibility of changing the conditions of his punishment, but the Ukrainians are engaged in a political and military struggle in which their actions genuinely affect the course of events.
Nor should Ukraine’s resistance be understood exclusively through the experiences of the battlefield. The preservation of ordinary civilisation under extraordinary pressure constitutes a distinct form of defiance. A theatre that continues to perform, a university that continues to teach, a newspaper that continues to publish and a family that continues to celebrate birthdays despite the alarms and explosions are all asserting that war shall not possess the entirety of human existence. Such activities may appear insignificant when measured against the movement of armies, but they preserve the cultural and psychological foundations upon which an independent society depends. Russia may attempt to impose her will through military force, but the persistence of Ukrainian civic life demonstrates the limitations of coercion as an instrument of political transformation.
There is something particularly Camusian about the Ukrainian capacity to combine grim circumstances with humour. Camus did not regard happiness as dependent upon the complete absence of suffering, and Ukrainians have demonstrated an extraordinary ability to find moments of pleasure and absurd comedy amidst their national ordeal. The jokes exchanged during blackouts, the irreverence directed towards Russian military incompetence and the determination to continue ordinary social rituals despite the possibility of sudden interruption all represent small declarations of psychological independence. Humour does not eliminate fear, but it prevents fear from acquiring a monopoly over the imagination. Even the most formidable apparatus of state violence encounters difficulties when confronted by a population that stubbornly refuses to take its pretensions entirely seriously.
Nevertheless, the greatest philosophical difference between Ukraine and Sisyphus remains the existence of a conceivable conclusion to her ordeal. The Greek hero must push his boulder forever because the gods have decreed that his punishment shall never end. Ukrainians are not subject to such a decree. Their resistance is directed towards the restoration of conditions in which resistance will no longer be necessary, at least in its present military form. They seek a future in which children can attend school without learning the geography of bomb shelters, electricity can be taken for granted and the principal political controversies concern the ordinary imperfections of democratic government rather than the survival of the state itself.
This possibility gives Ukrainian resistance a dimension that Camus’s original parable deliberately excludes. The struggle is not simply an assertion of individual dignity within an unchangeable universe. It is an attempt to change the political world so that future generations will not be obliged to endure the same punishment. The Ukrainian soldier holding a defensive position is not merely expressing his refusal to submit. He is attempting to create the circumstances in which his children, or the children of strangers, will not need to occupy that position themselves. The significance of his actions extends beyond his own consciousness into the uncertain but genuine possibilities of historical change.
Of course, even a successful conclusion to the present war would not abolish human suffering or guarantee the permanent disappearance of aggression. A liberated Ukraine would still confront the problems of reconstruction, corruption, demographic decline, political disagreement and the difficult reintegration of those whose lives have been transformed by military service. The struggle to build and preserve a decent society has no definitive conclusion. In that broader sense, Camus’s image of Sisyphus retains its relevance even after the guns fall silent. Human civilisation is a continuing enterprise in which achievements must be preserved, institutions repaired and injustices confronted by successive generations. No society reaches a summit from which it can safely retire forever.
Yet there is an enormous difference between the ordinary burdens of maintaining civilisation and the extraordinary burden of defending its existence against armed conquest. The former may indeed resemble the recurring labours described by Camus, because freedom requires permanent attention and human institutions remain perpetually imperfect. The latter is a contingent catastrophe caused by particular decisions, and it should not be romanticised as an unavoidable feature of national existence. Ukraine deserves the opportunity to exchange the exceptional heroism of wartime for the unexceptional difficulties of peace. Her people have earned the right to concern themselves with the price of housing, the quality of public transport and the familiar disappointments of electoral politics rather than the trajectory of ballistic missiles.
Perhaps, therefore, the ultimate lesson of Camus for Ukraine is not that Ukrainians must learn to love the endless repetition of their suffering. It is that the recognition of apparently overwhelming circumstances does not oblige human beings to surrender their moral independence. The value of resistance lies in the refusal to permit force to become the final arbiter of human affairs. Camus understood that there can be dignity in struggling against an indifferent universe, but Ukraine’s experience demonstrates something still more important: there can be practical consequences when human beings struggle against an oppressive political order. The absurdity of the circumstances does not establish the futility of the response.
In the original myth, the gods possess absolute power because they control both the punishment and its eternal repetition. In contemporary Ukraine, the would-be gods of the Kremlin possess no such metaphysical authority. Their armies can destroy buildings, their missiles can extinguish lives and their political decisions can impose immense suffering, but they cannot decree the ultimate direction of history. The Ukrainians have demonstrated this repeatedly through their refusal to accept that military superiority creates a legitimate title to political obedience. They have also shown that resistance is not merely a military activity but a continuing moral undertaking sustained by innumerable acts of ordinary human solidarity.
Camus asked us to imagine Sisyphus happy because, even in the face of eternal punishment, the human spirit might discover a freedom that the gods could not destroy. Ukraine invites us to contemplate a more hopeful possibility. We may imagine her people weary, grieving and frequently doubtful, but nevertheless continuing to push their enormous burden towards the summit because they possess reasons for believing that the mountain is not infinite. Their task is not to celebrate the rock, nor to discover some mystical happiness in the repetition of suffering. It is to preserve the freedom that makes a different future possible.
And perhaps the most meaningful tribute to the Ukrainians’ extraordinary resistance will come not when the world has learned to admire their endless endurance, but when that endurance is no longer required. Sisyphus, in Camus’s imagination, attains his dignity by refusing to surrender before an eternal punishment. Ukraine may yet demonstrate that the greater achievement is to resist long enough, and effectively enough, that the punishment itself can finally be brought to an end. The gods of Greek mythology could never permit Sisyphus to put down his rock. The rulers of Russia possess no such power over the destiny of their neighbour. The difference between mythology and history is that history can be changed, and the difference between despair and resistance is the determination to change it.
