The Fading Echoes of Moral Clarity in Ukraine's Protracted War
On a bright February morning in Lviv, just eighty kilometres from the European Union border, a team gathers for a strategy meeting over coffee. This simple ritual has become a precious luxury in wartime Ukraine, where electricity outages are routine. For Sasha Dovzhyk and her colleagues at INDEX, a cultural and research NGO documenting Ukrainian war experiences, these moments of normalcy are both essential and surreal.
As they discuss their work preserving individual stories for long-term justice, an alert flashes across their screens: a Russian ballistic missile is heading their way. The question "What shall we do?" hangs in the air briefly before an explosion sounds nearby—the missile intercepted. The meeting resumes, this interruption just another part of their new reality.
The Normalisation of Horror
Ukrainians have developed what Dovzhyk describes as a "peculiar sense of humour" to cope with their circumstances. She recounts asking a soldier friend to share "that funny story about your injury," which turns out to be a tale of running from a Russian drone while carrying a wounded comrade. Such stories have become commonplace, reflecting how war, loss, and resistance have been normalised across Ukrainian society.
"We have normalised war. We have normalised loss. We have normalised resistance," Dovzhyk writes. "Many of us have accepted that these abnormal things will stay with us for however long we manage to survive Russia's genocidal onslaught."
Remembering Early Resolve
Four years ago, during the initial phase of Russia's full-scale invasion, there was a widespread belief that international outrage would ensure a swift response. Dovzhyk recalls a demonstration in Lviv in March 2022, where survivors of the Mariupol siege held hand-drawn signs reading "Mariupol is on fire" and chanted "Nato, close the sky!"
"I stepped out of the group of reporters filming the scene and screamed with the demonstrators at the top of my lungs," she remembers. But neither Nato nor any other international entity closed the sky then—or now, as Russia systematically destroys Ukraine's energy infrastructure, including substations supplying nuclear power plants.
International Response and Its Consequences
The compromise of civilian nuclear infrastructure represents just one consequence of what Dovzhyk terms "the international community raising its levels of horror tolerance." Back in 2022, Ukrainians believed the world would stand with them if they demonstrated their willingness to defend themselves. Hundreds of thousands volunteered for the army, achieving significant military victories in Kyiv, Chernihiv, Kharkiv, and Kherson regions within months.
Civilian victories followed, including the Oscar-winning documentary 20 Days in Mariupol and the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Ukrainian human rights defender Oleksandra Matviichuk. Yet international aid has been "too slow, too limited and too fragmented," leaving Ukraine to fight a protracted war of attrition.
Voices Silenced by War
Dovzhyk revisits early war statements to recapture the moral clarity that prevailed before discourse became clouded with talk of compromise. More revealing are the words of those who didn't live long enough to become accustomed to horror.
In 2023, she travelled to the deoccupied Kharkiv region, witnessing mass graves containing 447 bodies near Izium. Among them was writer Volodymyr Vakulenko, whose final journal entry predicted Ukrainian victory. Another writer on that journey, Victoria Amelina, was researching Vakulenko's murder for her nonfiction book when a Russian missile killed her two months later.
"The words and lives of those people Russia took away from us are like bees in amber," Dovzhyk reflects. "They capture the untainted essence of Ukraine's fight."
Looking Forward Without Compromise
As the war enters its fifth year, Dovzhyk argues for pausing to look back in order to see the path ahead. "Compromises that feed Russian impunity will not lead us to lasting peace," she concludes. "The political imagination to envision Russian accountability might give us a chance."
The normalisation of war in Ukraine represents not just adaptation to circumstances but a tragic indicator of how international moral clarity has faded since 2022. What began as a shocking violation of sovereignty has become a protracted conflict where horror has been routine for too long.
