Why Does Russia Keep Fighting Wars It Can’t Win?

As I walked the old city of Warsaw, Poland, earlier this week, it would have been easy to think the buildings had been there for centuries. But I would have been mistaken. World War II resulted in the near total devastation of the entire city, from churches and palaces to centuries-old homes that carried with them the history of a people that have suffered one occupation after another. Whether the Nazis or the Soviets, the Poles have fought back to reclaim their language, their identity and their independence. When it comes to national resilience, it’s easy to applaud the tenacity of Poles to reclaim their culture and thrive. The Ukrainians seem to be following a similar path.

Why, though, has Russia so persistently pursued one war after another as the aggressor while a country like Germany has put aside its expansionist past? To those of us with the privilege of being able to read history untainted by propaganda, the Soviet passion to conquer makes little sense in a modern world governed by international trade and globalization. And yet, the pictures of wanton, unprovoked devastation visited upon Warsaw in World War II by the Nazis (as punishment for the Polish people resisting occupation) are eerily reminiscent of the images we see of modern-day Bakhmut and other Ukrainian cities which are being subjugated by Russia’s military. It seems to me that by any reasonable measure, Russians should know that no war fought against a population with freedom in mind will win. They resisted the Germans as tenaciously as the Poles. And yet, they continue a war of aggression that casts them into the role of the aggressor.

Perhaps the explanation for the war against Ukraine lies in something best described as the resilience paradox. Where resilience is normally extolled as the power to recover, to persist, and to thrive despite the odds, it can also be corrupted into a horrible, narcissistic pursuit of a goal that should long ago have been left behind. Persistence and grit have their limits when they result in making the same mistake over and over again. The arrogance of the dictator should not be mistaken for the benevolence of the defender who knows when to withdraw and seek peace with one’s enemy.

What, though, predisposes Russia’s leadership to engage in these expansionist wars? Perhaps the answer lies in the pages of Anne Applebaum’s Pulitzer Prize winning Gulag: A History. Russians have been sacrificing large numbers of their population for centuries. Might such wanton waste have left a degree of historical trauma that makes the population desensitized to the bombing of civilian populations in Ukraine? Or could there simply be a national identity founded on the right to empire? On this second point, I have to defer to a Russian colleague of mine, a psychologist (who I won’t name for the sake of his own safety). While a well-travelled scholar, he once told me that the West “really doesn’t understand Russia” and that the quest for empire was seen as Russia’s right as a superpower. Whether Russia warrants that title is debatable, but that doesn’t matter. When a nation perceives itself as all-powerful an expansionist psychology is a logical outcome.

As more Russian soldiers die, and many more Ukrainian civilians perish defending themselves, one may assume that such destruction has become too psychologically commonplace to shock Russians into a critical reappraisal of such senseless violence. If that is to change, we are first going to have to embrace the idea that for some Russians, the war is simply another expression of their collective resilience, no matter that it is a resilience that keeps imperiling their future and that of their neighbors. A better understanding of resilience, as transformation to an identity that does not depend on the oppression of others, seems to be goal which remains as elusive as peace itself.