Ukraine’s War for Freedom from Fear

By Matthew Parish

Thursday 8 October 2026

There are many ways of understanding Ukraine’s war against Russia. It is a war for national survival, because the Russian state has repeatedly denied the legitimacy of a separate Ukrainian political identity. It is a war about territory, because substantial parts of Ukraine remain under Russian occupation. It is a geopolitical war, because its outcome will influence the European security order for decades. And, most immediately, it is a physical war in which people are killed every day by drones, missiles, artillery and infantry assaults.

Yet there is another dimension that is less often discussed, perhaps because it is difficult to quantify. Ukrainians are also fighting against fear: against incorporation into a political system in which fear has historically been one of the principal instruments through which authority maintains itself. This is a struggle not merely for the possession of Ukrainian territory, but also for the psychological freedom of the people who live upon it.

The expression “psychological terrorism” must be used carefully. Terrorism has legal and political meanings that should not simply be stretched to cover every form of authoritarian government. Nevertheless there is a recognisable political technique in which the state does not need to punish everybody because everybody understands that punishment may descend unpredictably upon anybody. The uncertainty is the point. A citizen learns to calculate what may safely be said, which websites may safely be visited, which jokes may safely be repeated, which organisations may safely be supported and which subjects are better left undiscussed.

Contemporary Russia provides substantial evidence of precisely such a system of government. Political power has become concentrated around Vladimir Putin, accompanied by controlled media, compliant institutions, extensive surveillance and suppression of genuine political opposition. Russian citizens have been prosecuted and imprisoned for peaceful dissent and anti-war speech, while the legal boundaries between legitimate criticism, “discrediting” the armed forces, extremism and threats to state security have become sufficiently broad to encourage caution far beyond those people who actually find themselves prosecuted.

These numbers and prosecutions matter, but they do not capture the most important psychological mechanism. An authoritarian government does not have to arrest millions of people. It has to arrest enough people that millions of others imagine the possibility of arrest. That is the economy of fear upon which such systems operate.

The knock on the door

The Soviet Union perfected this method. Its most extreme manifestations belonged to the Stalinist period, when disappearance, denunciation, interrogation and execution became features of everyday political existence. Yet the psychological inheritance survived the death of Stalin. Soviet citizens learned the distinction between what one said publicly, what one said among trusted friends and what one thought privately. Political language developed layers. There was the language of newspapers and official meetings, another language around the kitchen table and sometimes a third language inside one’s own head.

This produced one of authoritarianism’s strangest achievements: the internalisation of the policeman. Once that has happened, enormous numbers of police officers are unnecessary. People begin policing themselves. They anticipate the possible reaction of authority before authority needs to react. They remove the offending sentence before an editor sees it. They decide not to attend the demonstration. They do not telephone the troublesome friend. They avert their eyes when somebody else is arrested. Eventually they may cease consciously noticing that they are doing these things.

This is why political repression cannot adequately be measured by counting prisoners. The real constituency of repression consists of everyone who modifies his behaviour because somebody else has been imprisoned. A single prosecution, if sufficiently publicised and sufficiently arbitrary in its apparent application, can discipline thousands of people who will never encounter a police officer themselves.

Modern technology makes this potentially more pervasive rather than less. The authoritarian state no longer requires a neighbour listening through an apartment wall when citizens voluntarily carry devices recording their locations, communications and social networks. The important psychological effect is uncertainty. Nobody knows precisely where the boundary lies and therefore sensible people remain some distance behind it.

What occupation means

For Ukrainians, this question is not theoretical because Russian political practices can be examined in territories that Russia actually occupies. Reports from occupied areas have documented severe restrictions upon freedom of expression alongside arbitrary detention, torture and ill-treatment, pressure surrounding Russian citizenship, suppression of Ukrainian education and attempts to integrate occupied communities into Russian political and administrative structures.

This is where the abstract argument about psychological freedom becomes concrete. Imagine what these practices mean at the level of an ordinary family. They mean considering what a child says at school and wondering whether a neighbour can be trusted. They mean deciding whether a Ukrainian flag hidden in a cupboard is dangerous. They mean wondering whether somebody has noticed which Telegram channels you read. They mean considering whether the wrong opinion expressed to the wrong person might affect your employment, your property or your liberty. They mean, ultimately, learning fear.

Reports of detention, torture and mistreatment matter not merely because of the suffering inflicted upon their immediate victims. Every disappearance sends a message to the surrounding community, and every story of somebody being questioned, detained or punished establishes another boundary around permissible behaviour. This is how fear multiplies, spreading beyond the individual who experiences repression directly and entering the calculations of everyone who hears about it.

Two ideas of government

The contrast between Ukraine and Russia should not be romanticised into a fairy tale in which every Ukrainian institution is liberal and virtuous while every Russian citizen embraces authoritarianism. Ukraine has corruption, institutional weaknesses, political quarrels and human-rights problems of its own. Wartime conditions have generated difficult questions about mobilisation, political freedoms, media policy and the proper limits of state power. A country does not become perfect merely because it is defending itself against aggression.

Indeed freedom means preserving the right to say that one’s own government is wrong, and that is precisely the distinction that matters. Ukrainian politics is argumentative to the point of exhaustion. Presidents are mocked. Ministers are criticised. Journalists investigate officials. Citizens complain endlessly about corruption, mobilisation, taxes, electricity, bureaucracy and the conduct of the war. Governments change and political careers collapse. Ukrainians disagree about virtually everything, often loudly and sometimes viciously.

This apparent disorder is not necessarily evidence of democratic failure. Much of it is what freedom looks like. A free society is noisy because people are not required to pretend that they agree. Democracy does not eliminate stupidity, corruption, incompetence or bad government. It provides mechanisms through which people can describe these things without treating criticism itself as treason.

Authoritarian government offers a superficially seductive alternative because everything appears more orderly. Television presenters agree with politicians, politicians agree with the President, courts seldom inconvenience the executive, demonstrations become scarce and newspapers discover remarkable consistency in their editorial opinions. The tranquillity becomes less impressive once one remembers why everybody agrees, or at least why everybody has learned to behave publicly as though they do.

Freedom inside the mind

This may explain something about Ukrainian resistance that outsiders sometimes misunderstand. From a purely material perspective, the price Ukraine has paid for resistance is staggering. Cities have been damaged, families divided and millions displaced. Soldiers have spent years moving between trenches, hospitals and brief periods of leave. Civilians have adapted their lives to air-raid alarms and nights punctuated by explosions. Yet the enormous material price of resistance cannot be understood without considering the alternative against which Ukrainians believe themselves to be fighting.

Why endure all this? There are obviously many answers. Patriotism is one. National identity is another. Attachment to language, family, territory and home are others. But there is also a quieter motivation: people who have experienced substantial personal freedom may develop an extraordinary unwillingness to surrender it.

Freedom is difficult to notice while one possesses it because it consists largely of absences. Nobody knocks on the door. Nobody asks what you were reading. Nobody demands enthusiasm for the President. Nobody requires your child to repeat political orthodoxies at school. Nobody asks why you know a foreigner. Nobody makes you wonder whether an incautious sentence spoken after several drinks will be remembered by somebody sitting at the next table. Because these things do not happen, one forgets that their absence is itself a political achievement.

Then one sees what happens where they do happen, and the abstractions of political philosophy acquire immediate meaning. The experience of Russian occupation has provided Ukrainians with a brutal demonstration of the alternative political future. The question is no longer an academic argument about whether Ukraine ought culturally to face east or west. It concerns the relationship between the individual and authority: whether the state belongs to the citizen, however imperfectly, or whether the citizen belongs to the state.

The terrorism of anticipation

The most effective psychological coercion is anticipatory. The victim disciplines himself before the threat has to be carried out. This principle operates in families, criminal organisations, abusive institutions and authoritarian governments alike. Punishment establishes the credibility of the threat; thereafter imagination performs much of the work.

The Russian system has increasingly developed this quality. Laws concerning supposedly false information, the “discrediting” of the armed forces, extremist activity and cooperation with undesirable organisations create categories broad enough that citizens cannot always know with confidence whether their conduct will attract official attention. The result is not necessarily that everybody believes state propaganda. That would be too ambitious and is unnecessary. The objective is that enough people behave as though they believe it.

This distinction is fundamental to understanding authoritarian societies. They can contain millions of privately sceptical citizens while remaining outwardly unanimous. The regime does not need to colonise every mind. It merely needs to make sincerity dangerous. The citizen may privately consider the government absurd, corrupt or criminal, but if expressing those thoughts entails unpredictable consequences, private disbelief is perfectly compatible with public obedience.

Ukraine’s political culture, for all its faults, has developed in the opposite direction. Its citizens have become accustomed to political irreverence. They ridicule their leaders with an enthusiasm that can bewilder foreigners. They criticise institutions while simultaneously volunteering to sustain them. They argue furiously about how the country should be governed while agreeing, often without expressly saying so, that the argument belongs to them.

Russia’s invasion therefore threatens something more intimate than Ukraine’s borders. It threatens the right to remain psychologically disobedient, to maintain that private territory inside the human mind in which government is not sacred, leaders can be ridiculous and authority must continually justify itself.

The empire inside the individual

Empires traditionally announce themselves on maps. They change borders, flags, currencies and administrative institutions. Yet successful imperial domination eventually reaches deeper. It changes what people believe they are permitted to say about the map, and eventually it may seek to change what they remember about how the map came to exist in the first place.

This is why Russification in occupied Ukraine involves more than passports and government offices. Education matters. Television matters. Language matters. History matters. The stories children hear about the country in which they were born matter enormously. A government attempting permanently to absorb conquered territory must eventually persuade, intimidate or exhaust its inhabitants into accepting a different conception of themselves.

The battle therefore takes place inside memory as well as across fields, villages and ruined industrial towns. Was Ukraine ever really independent? Is Ukrainian a genuine language? Were Ukrainian historical figures heroes or criminals? Was the invasion actually liberation? Are those who resisted patriots or extremists? Once political power claims authority over the answers to these questions, occupation has moved beyond military control and entered the imagination.

That is why Ukrainians protecting their cultural identity are not necessarily indulging in sentimental nationalism. Culture becomes a defensive fortification when another state attempts to prescribe identity. A poem, a language, a historical memory or even a particular conception of humour may acquire political significance because these things preserve an individual’s ability to say: this is who I am, and government cannot decide it for me.

Why Ukrainians continue fighting

There is consequently a straightforward answer to the question frequently posed abroad: why do Ukrainians continue to fight when the costs are so terrible? The answer is that surrender also has costs, even though many of them cannot be represented conveniently upon military maps or financial spreadsheets.

Those costs cannot all be measured in kilometres of territory, numbers of casualties or billions of dollars. They include the transformation of everyday life. They include the possibility that citizens must begin watching their words. They include changes to schools, newspapers, courts, elections, churches and historical memory. They include the gradual replacement of spontaneous civic life with obedience and the substitution of uncertainty for the ordinary assumption that a private opinion belongs to the person who holds it.

Above all, they include fear. A missile is terrifying because it may destroy your home. A drone is terrifying because it may kill you. But a political system founded upon intimidation creates another species of terror: the persistent knowledge that authority may punish you for what you say, what you read, whom you know or what you believe. The first terror threatens the body, while the second enters the mind. Ukraine is fighting against both.

Freedom from fear

Franklin Roosevelt famously included “freedom from fear” among the fundamental freedoms to which human beings should aspire. The phrase has become so familiar that its radical character is easily forgotten. A person who lives in fear is not free even when nobody happens to be arresting him today, because the possibility of arbitrary coercion already shapes his behaviour.

Freedom therefore requires more than elections and constitutions. It requires a psychological relationship between citizen and government in which the citizen does not instinctively lower his voice when politics is mentioned. It requires the presumption that government officials are ordinary human beings who can be criticised, mocked, dismissed and replaced rather than distant authorities whose displeasure must constantly be anticipated.

This may ultimately be one of the deepest differences exposed by the Russo-Ukrainian war. The conflict is certainly about sovereignty and borders. It is about NATO, European security, military power and competing historical narratives. Yet beneath all these abstractions lies a simpler struggle over the atmosphere in which ordinary human beings will live.

Will they inhabit a society in which political disagreement is an ordinary feature of life, or one in which disagreement carries an uncertain price? Will children grow up learning to question authority, or learning which questions must never be asked? Will neighbours argue with one another, or quietly wonder which neighbour might report them? Will citizens laugh at their politicians, or first look over their shoulders? These may appear small matters beside armies, missiles and territorial maps, but they are not. They are the substance of political freedom.

The tragedy of Ukraine is that millions of people have had to fight physically for something fundamentally psychological: the right not to be afraid of government. Every democratic society is imperfect and Ukraine’s will remain so after the war. Its institutions will require reform, its corruption will require relentless attention and its politicians will continue deserving criticism. Yet criticism is itself part of the prize, because the right to complain about one’s government without fearing it is among the most ordinary and therefore most easily underestimated achievements of a free political order.

The ultimate freedom for which Ukrainians are fighting may therefore be expressed in an extraordinarily modest proposition: they want to be able to say what they think, to disagree with those who govern them and to determine their own national identity without coercion. Above all, they do not want to be frightened when they do so.