War and the Extremities of the Human Character

By Matthew Parish

Wednesday 14 October 2026

War is sometimes described as an aberration in human affairs, an interruption of the ordinary course of civilisation during which people behave in ways that they would never contemplate in times of peace. The experience of Ukraine suggests something rather different. War does not necessarily change human nature. More often, it exposes it. It strips away the institutions, conventions, habits and minor courtesies that ordinarily conceal the extremes of human character, and reveals capacities for courage and cowardice, generosity and greed, loyalty and betrayal that were there all along. This is one reason why war is so psychologically exhausting even for those who survive it physically intact. One discovers things about other people, and sometimes about oneself, that it might have been more comfortable never to know.

Ukraine since February 2022 has become an immense laboratory of the human condition, although that is an appalling way to describe a country in which millions of people have been obliged to conduct this experiment involuntarily. The full-scale Russian invasion has subjected Ukrainians to pressures almost unimaginable in most of contemporary Europe. People have lost their homes, relatives, livelihoods and assumptions about the future. Soldiers have spent months or years moving between positions in which death may arrive from an artillery shell, a glide bomb or an inexpensive drone. Families have been divided across continents. Millions have learned the geography of bomb shelters, the sounds of different weapons and the peculiar rituals by which ordinary life continues during air-raid alerts.

Yet amidst this destruction, Ukraine has produced innumerable examples of astonishing human decency. People who previously led entirely unremarkable lives have driven vehicles towards front-line settlements to evacuate strangers. Volunteers have purchased generators, medical supplies, drones, vehicles and protective equipment with money gathered from friends and anonymous donors. Railway workers have continued operating trains towards cities under bombardment. Doctors and nurses have worked through attacks on electricity infrastructure. Soldiers have carried wounded comrades from positions while exposing themselves to danger. Families have opened their homes to people displaced from the other side of the country.

There is something important about the ordinariness of many of these people. Heroism in war is frequently imagined as the property of exceptional personalities, as though courageous people belonged to a recognisable category before the war began. The Ukrainian experience repeatedly contradicts this idea. The accountant becomes a logistics officer. The software engineer learns to fly drones. The teacher organises humanitarian supplies. The mechanic repairs military vehicles. The grandmother cooks meals for soldiers she has never met. None of these people necessarily imagined themselves as heroes beforehand, and many would be embarrassed by the description afterwards. Circumstances presented them with a choice and they discovered that they were capable of more than they had previously known.

This is one of war’s terrible paradoxes. Some of the most admirable qualities in human beings become visible precisely because circumstances have become sufficiently dreadful to require them. Courage requires danger. Sacrifice requires something valuable that might be lost. Solidarity acquires its deepest meaning when people are frightened and vulnerable. There is therefore something almost offensive about romanticising these virtues in wartime, because nobody should have been required to demonstrate them in the first place. Nevertheless they are real, and Ukraine would not have survived without them.

The same circumstances reveal the opposite characteristics. War produces profiteers alongside volunteers, cowards alongside heroes and opportunists alongside patriots. Wherever enormous quantities of money, equipment and humanitarian assistance begin moving rapidly through imperfect institutions, somebody will try to steal them. Wherever regulations become complicated and emergency powers extensive, somebody will discover an opportunity to sell influence. Wherever people desperately need documents, transport, military exemptions or permission to cross borders, markets may emerge around those needs. War does not suspend ordinary human greed. It gives greed unusual opportunities.

This can be particularly shocking because the contrast is so severe. A soldier may risk his life for a salary that would appear modest in Western Europe while somebody hundreds of kilometres from the front attempts to become wealthy from the circumstances that placed the soldier there. A volunteer may spend months collecting small donations to purchase equipment while another person regards the same supply chain primarily as an opportunity for personal enrichment. One person sees a wounded stranger and asks how to help; another sees vulnerability and calculates a price.

None of this is peculiarly Ukrainian. Every war has produced profiteering, corruption, desertion, collaboration, black markets and fraud. Britain experienced profiteering during both world wars. Occupied Europe produced collaborators alongside resistance movements. Humanitarian catastrophes across the world have attracted people simultaneously motivated by extraordinary compassion and extraordinary selfishness. To pretend otherwise is to replace history with patriotic mythology, and Ukraine does not need mythology to make its case for admiration. The reality is impressive enough.

There is another, darker transformation produced by prolonged war. People become accustomed to things to which human beings ought never to become accustomed. A missile attack becomes something discussed over breakfast. Photographs of destroyed buildings are glanced at between messages on a telephone. Death becomes statistical: five killed here, twelve wounded there. A soldier’s death is announced on social media, condolences are written and another announcement appears the following day. This psychological adaptation is necessary because nobody can remain permanently horrified and continue functioning. Yet it extracts a price. The emotional armour that permits survival may gradually make tenderness more difficult.

Hatred also becomes easier. This is unsurprising when somebody is trying to kill you. It would be unreasonable to demand serene philosophical detachment from a person whose friend has been killed or whose home has been destroyed. Nevertheless hatred has its own momentum. It encourages people to stop distinguishing between governments, armies and individuals. It turns populations into abstractions and abstractions into enemies. Every prolonged conflict creates language through which the humanity of the other side is diminished, because killing is psychologically easier when the person being killed has first been converted into a category.

Russia’s invasion has provided abundant reasons for Ukrainian anger. Cities have been damaged or destroyed, civilians killed and millions displaced. Yet precisely because the causes of that anger are so substantial, preserving distinctions remains important. The Kremlin is not identical to every Russian citizen. A Russian conscript is not identical to the political leadership that ordered the invasion. Nor are Ukrainians themselves a homogeneous body of saints. War encourages collective categories because armies must necessarily operate through them, but moral judgement ultimately concerns human beings and their choices.

This is where the worst dimensions of warfare become apparent. Once violence has become normal, almost anything can acquire a justification. Cruelty may be called necessity. Revenge may be called justice. Indifference may be called realism. People who would once have recoiled from suffering may find themselves celebrating it when the victims belong to the enemy. The moral danger of war is therefore not merely that people may die. It is that the survivors may gradually become people they would once have disliked.

Against this stands an extraordinary stubbornness of ordinary humanity. In Ukrainian cities near the front, cafés remain open. People fall in love. Children attend lessons. Musicians perform. Friends quarrel over trivial matters. Dogs still demand to be walked during air-raid alerts. Birthdays are celebrated and marriages take place. People complain about bureaucracy, traffic and the price of coffee while missiles are being launched against their country. From a distance this may seem surreal, but from inside a war it is entirely logical. Continuing ordinary life becomes a form of resistance against the proposition that violence should determine everything.

Perhaps this is one reason outsiders sometimes misunderstand countries at war. They expect constant solemnity. They imagine everybody permanently preoccupied with geopolitics, death and national destiny. In reality human beings cannot live that way. A society under attack remains a society, full of jokes, romances, jealousies, ambitions, kindnesses, irritations and absurdities. War does not eliminate normal life. It coexists with it, sometimes in the same street and sometimes within the same person.

Ukraine has also demonstrated the strange capacity of war to create friendships of extraordinary intensity. People who might never have encountered one another in peacetime are thrown together by evacuation work, military service, humanitarian organisations or simple accident. Trust develops rapidly because circumstances demand it. Somebody who was a stranger yesterday may tomorrow be responsible for your life. Relationships formed under these conditions can acquire a depth that years of peaceful acquaintance never achieve.

But war destroys relationships just as efficiently. People discover that friends hold opinions they cannot tolerate. Families divide over politics, geography, military service or decisions to leave or remain. Some people become exhausted with those who talk incessantly about the war; others become furious with those who seem capable of ignoring it. Those who serve may resent those who do not. Those who remain may resent those who left, while those abroad may feel misunderstood by those who stayed. Suffering does not automatically make people generous towards one another. Sometimes it makes them less so.

This is why the phrase “war brings people together” is only half true. War intensifies. It compresses years of moral choices into months and sometimes minutes. It creates circumstances in which small decisions acquire enormous consequences. Whether somebody answers a telephone, opens a door, shares a vehicle, tells the truth, keeps a promise or turns around to collect another person may determine whether somebody lives. Character matters more because the stakes attached to character have suddenly increased.

The distinction between courage and cowardice is also more complicated than comfortable narratives allow. Fear is universal. A person who appears fearless may simply conceal fear effectively, while somebody who admits terror may nevertheless perform an extraordinarily courageous act. Courage is not the absence of fear but the decision that something else matters more. Ukraine’s soldiers understand this more intimately than anyone observing them from abroad. There is nothing romantic about sitting in a trench while drones search for human targets overhead. The courage lies precisely in understanding the danger and remaining nevertheless.

The same principle applies beyond the battlefield. There is courage in the doctor who continues working during bombardment, in the parent who keeps children calm during an explosion and in the volunteer who repeatedly drives towards places from which everyone else is trying to escape. There is even a quieter courage in maintaining intellectual and cultural life during wartime: publishing newspapers, staging performances, teaching classes, writing books and insisting that a country is more than the military struggle forced upon it.

Ukraine therefore offers no simple lesson that war makes people better. It plainly does not. Nor does war make people uniformly worse. Instead it removes many of the cushions that permit moral ambiguity to remain theoretical. In peaceful societies, a person may spend decades imagining that he is courageous, generous or loyal without ever encountering circumstances in which those qualities cost very much. War presents the invoice.

Some pay it. Some do not. Some discover capacities for goodness they never suspected themselves to possess. Others discover that principles they proclaimed confidently during peaceful years disappear when those principles become inconvenient or dangerous. Most people probably discover something more complicated: that they are capable of both generosity and selfishness, courage and fear, patience and rage, sometimes within the same day.

That may be the most unsettling lesson of Ukraine’s war. The heroes and villains of history are not members of separate species. They emerge from the same human material as everybody else. Circumstances matter, institutions matter and leadership matters, but eventually individuals encounter choices. Some of those choices are enormous and dramatic. Most are small, repetitive and largely invisible.

After the war, Ukraine will have to live with everything it has discovered about itself. There will be stories of extraordinary sacrifice, but also uncomfortable accounts of corruption, avoidance, collaboration and betrayal. There will be veterans whose experiences civilians struggle to understand, families carrying grief and people who became wealthy while others lost everything. There will also be friendships that would never otherwise have existed, institutions created out of necessity and a generation possessing knowledge about human nature that nobody would willingly acquire.

A mature society will have to resist the temptation to simplify all this into a national legend. Ukraine’s achievement is not that every Ukrainian became heroic after February 2022. No nation consists entirely of heroes. Its achievement is that enough people, faced with circumstances they never requested, repeatedly decided to do things that kept other people alive and their country functioning.

War reveals humanity at maximum magnification. The compassionate become capable of astonishing compassion, the predatory discover abundant prey and the enormous majority between those extremes are forced to make decisions they never imagined confronting. Ukraine has seen all of these things. It has seen bravery and fear, generosity and theft, solidarity and division, tenderness and hatred.

That is why the deepest lesson of this war may ultimately be neither military nor geopolitical. It is a lesson about what human beings contain within themselves. Civilisation normally allows us the luxury of not discovering the answer. War removes that luxury, and what it reveals can be magnificent and horrifying at once.