Refusing to resist evil is worse than war itself.
A few summers ago, a paper wasp began constructing a nest in the eaves above my front door. In my youth, I would have knocked it down without a second thought or reached for a can of pesticide. But I stood on the porch, watched the creature work, and stepped quietly inside. It has just as much a right to live as I do.
I do not hunt anymore. I do not fish. To live this way is not an affectation of saintliness; it is an exhaustion of the spirit.
When I deployed to Afghanistan, I entered a world where the fragility of the human body was laid bare every day. I saw what shrapnel does to flesh. I saw men tortured by the Taliban for infractions as trivial as a trimmed beard or listening to an unsanctioned radio broadcast. I carried the memory of battle buddies whose lives ended in abrupt, deafening flashes, leaving behind boots, folded flags, and silence.
In war, you learn the most terrible secret of the human condition: taking a life is shockingly, horrifyingly easy. A half-inch squeeze of a trigger, a coordinate keyed into a radio, a brief lapse of attention at a checkpoint—and an entire cosmos of memory, love, and consciousness collapses into dirt and blood.
I came home hating war for what it does to people – both to civilians and to soldiers. I will hate it until the day I die.
And yet, when the Russian armor rolled across the Ukrainian frontier in the freezing dawn of February 2022, I did not find myself retreating into the comfortable sanctuary of absolute pacifism. Instead, I found myself fiercely, unreservedly hoping for the destruction of the invading force.
It is a contradiction that unsettles the modern conscience, particularly among comfortable Westerners who have enjoyed the relative peace of the post-Cold War era. But it is a contradiction that anyone who has truly looked into the abyss of unprovoked violence must eventually confront: War is an absolute evil. But there are some things on this earth that are far more evil than war.
There is an enduring delusion in certain intellectual circles that peace is simply the absence of gunfire. This view reduces statecraft to a mechanical equation where any cessation of hostilities, regardless of the terms, represents a moral victory.
To believe this is to mistake subjugation for peace. Defending one’s home, one’s neighborhood, one’s house of worship, and the lives of one’s children against an unprovoked, imperial aggressor is not warmongering; it is an act of elemental decency. It is the preservation of the moral order against an engine of annihilation.
Americans and Europeans should understand this distinction instinctively. Our modern democratic civilization was forged in the blood shed to break the spine of Nazi Germany. When the Allied armies landed in Normandy, they did not cross the English Channel out of a romantic love for battle. They went because the alternative was a continent-wide slaughterhouse governed by totalitarian terror. They recognized that when an empire decides that its neighbors have no right to exist, non-resistance is not a virtue—it is complicity.
What we are witnessing in Ukraine is not a border dispute or a tragic misunderstanding of great-power diplomacy. It is a campaign of deliberate, systematic savagery orchestrated by Vladimir Putin.
From the mass graves of Bucha and the scorched ruins of Mariupol to the filtration camps and the routine bombardment of apartment blocks, maternity wards, and power grids, the Russian military has conducted itself not as an army bound by the laws of armed conflict, but as a punitive expedition designed to terrorize a sovereign population into submission.
The Geneva Conventions were drafted precisely because humanity peered into the horrors of the mid-twentieth century and attempted to place a barrier—however thin—between warfare and absolute barbarism. Putin’s army has dismantled that barrier. They have executed prisoners of war, targeted civilian evacuation corridors, subjected detainees to systematic torture, and abducted tens of thousands of Ukrainian children to be forcibly assimilated into Russia.
These are not the incidental tragedies of combat; they are policy. They are the deliberate methods of a regime that views international law with sneering contempt. When an invading army conducts itself in this manner, it forfeits any claim to soldierly honor. It operates instead in the lineage of the twentieth century’s darkest regimes.
This brings us to a question that the Russian people, and particularly the Russian soldier, must answer for themselves: Is this what you wish your nation to be remembered for?
Throughout history, great cultures have suffered deep moral collapses. But rarely has a nation squandered its standing so swiftly, so thoroughly, and for so grotesque a cause. When the world looks at Russian soldiers today, it does not see the heirs to the Red Army soldiers who fought at Stalingrad or the compatriots of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Rachmaninoff. It sees men who loot washing machines from devastated homes, who castrate captives, who fire cruise missiles into crowded shopping malls.
Do Russian citizens truly desire their motherland to be forever whispered in the same breath as the killing fields of Cambodia? Do they wish their flag to evoke the terror of Idi Amin’s Uganda, the machete-wielding militias of the Rwandan genocide, or the SS Einsatzgruppen sweeping through Eastern Europe?
Putin is systematically incinerating every vestige of culture, humanity, and moral dignity Russia ever possessed. He has turned a nation with a rich, complex history into a pariah state—an international outcast whose primary exports are now crude oil, propaganda, and human suffering.
For generations, many in the West regarded Russia as a European power capable of shared moral and civilizational commitments, rooted in a deep, if often troubled, Christian heritage. But what is Christian about bombing an Orthodox cathedral in Odesa? What is moral about leaving an entire generation of Ukrainian orphans in the wake of an imperial fantasy? What decency is preserved when priests in Moscow bless weapons designed to incinerate families in their sleep?
This is not the defense of traditional values. It is nihilism dressed in the vestments of empire.
The tragedy of the modern Russian state is that it has convinced its populace that paranoia is patriotism, and that isolation is strength. But history will not be kind to this generation of Russians. The stain of this war will not wash out when the artillery finally falls silent. It will linger for decades in the devastated Russian economy, in the severed cultural ties, and in the quiet horror with which the civilized world now views anyone wearing a Russian uniform.
There remains a narrow, closing window for redemption. If Russian soldiers wish to reclaim their humanity, they must refuse illegal orders. If Russian citizens wish for their children to have a future that extends beyond the grim, isolated corridors of a garrison state, they must find the courage to confront the dictator who is consuming their nation’s youth to feed his own vanity.
Investors will not return to save a bankrupt economy overseen by war criminals. The community of nations will not welcome back a state that treats international borders as suggestions and human rights as a Western conspiracy. The only path back to civilization begins with the cessation of this criminal war and the overthrow of the regime that authored it.
On my porch, the seasons turn. The wasp’s nest eventually fell away in the autumn wind, leaving only a faint trace against the wood. Life goes on in the quiet corners of the world because others have stood in the breach to keep the darkness at bay.
I still turn away when a wasp lands near the door. I still feel a deep, physical revulsion whenever I see footage of artillery duels and burning fields. I will never romanticize the act of killing.
Yet when I see a Ukrainian soldier in a muddy trench outside Kupiansk, rifle in hand, watching the tree line for the next assault, I do not see an agent of violence. I see an ordinary person—a teacher, an IT worker, a farmer—carrying the terrible, unchosen weight of the world on their shoulders.
They are fighting because they know what happens if they lay down their arms. They know that in the face of an enemy that recognizes no law and no mercy, surrender does not mean peace; it means the grave. And so they stand, not because they love war, but because they love the children sleeping in the shelters behind them.
To support them is not a betrayal of peace. It is the only way peace will ever have a chance to survive.
And yes, as a U.S. citizen, I realize the parallels between Putin’s authoritarianism and Doanld Trump’s wanna-be authoritarianism. I also see the parallels between Putin and Donald Trump’s arrogance, cruelty, and efforts to abandon the rule of law here as Putin has done in Russia. Fortunately, Donald Trump is too incompetent and too low-IQ to achieve in the US the dictatorial powers Putin has. Nevertheless, Trump’s poor leadership and Trump’s abdication of U.S. leadership in the world, has led to the world losing respect for what had been a great nation until January 20, 2025. The U.S. is now seen as an increasingly failing world power, led by a corrupt and incompetent leader, with an inept foreign policy, an illegal war, and whose leader is a threat to both world stability and to democratic norms and freedoms at home. The Russian people failed but so have the American people who elected Trump. Both leaders are a threat to peace and to the causes of democracy and freedom. Both Russia’s war and Trump’s Iran war are immoral. The only reason the U.S. is at war in Iran is because of Trump’s weak leadership and poor counsel. The only reason Ukraine is at war is because of Putin’s invasion. Both wars are wrong.
Dr. Beaux Bonhoeffer
Find me also @beauxbonhoeffer.bsky.social and at beauxbonhoeffer.substack.com
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