The Open Wound

Suffering, in its rawest form, is not merely an abstract concept or a fleeting emotion; it is a corporeal reality, etched into the body of the individual, the community, and the land itself. The body—whether human, social, or territorial—becomes a canvas for the wounds of existence, a silent witness to the ruptures of history. In the Russo-Ukrainian War, spanning from the annexation of Crimea in 2014 to the full-scale invasion of 2022 and beyond, we encounter a body of suffering that is both singular and collective, a tapestry of pain woven from the threads of human resilience, loss, and the search for meaning amidst devastation. The Body as a Site of Suffering The body, in its physicality, is the first and most intimate register of suffering. In the Russo-Ukrainian War, bodies have borne the brunt of violence in its most visceral forms: soldiers maimed by shrapnel, civilians crushed under the rubble of bombed cities, children orphaned by the indiscriminate hand of war. The body becomes a map of scars, each wound a story of survival or surrender. In Mariupol, during the 2022 siege, the bodies of the dead lay unburied in the streets, their decay a grim testament to the collapse of human dignity under the weight of conflict. These bodies are not mere casualties; they are texts, inscribed with the brutal language of war, speaking of fragility and finitude. Philosophically, the body’s suffering challenges the Cartesian dualism that separates mind and matter. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in his phenomenology of perception, argued that the body is not merely an object but the very condition of our being-in-the-world. In war, the body’s primacy is undeniable: it is the site where pain is felt, where fear is embodied, where death is met. The Ukrainian soldier, clutching a rifle in a freezing trench, or the mother shielding her child from shelling in Kharkiv, experiences the world through the body’s vulnerability. This vulnerability, as Emmanuel Levinas might suggest, is not a weakness but a call to responsibility—an ethical demand to recognize the Other’s suffering as our own. Yet, in war, this ethical call is often drowned out by the cacophony of destruction, leaving bodies to bear the weight of dehumanization. The Russo-Ukrainian War reveals the body’s suffering as both singular and collective. Each individual body—shattered, displaced, or grieving—contributes to a larger body politic, a nation wounded yet defiant. Ukraine, as a geopolitical entity, is itself a body under assault, its borders violated, its cities scarred, its people dispersed. The annexation of Crimea in 2014 was a surgical incision, a theft of territory that left the nation’s body incomplete. The 2022 invasion, by contrast, was a full-scale amputation, an attempt to erase Ukraine’s sovereignty altogether. Yet, in the face of this violence, the Ukrainian body politic has shown remarkable resilience, knitting itself together through acts of resistance, solidarity, and survival. The Temporality of Suffering Suffering, as experienced in the Russo-Ukrainian War, is not confined to the moment of violence; it stretches across time, haunting the past, present, and future. The war’s origins in 2014, with the annexation of Crimea and the conflict in Donbas, cast a long shadow over the present. Families displaced from Donetsk or Luhansk carry the weight of lost homes, lost identities, lost futures. The trauma of 2014 is not a closed chapter but a living wound, reopened with each new bombardment in 2022 and beyond. This temporality of suffering aligns with Augustine’s concept of time as a distension of the soul, where past, present, and future coexist in the lived experience of pain. For Ukrainians, the memory of Maidan, the hope of independence, and the fear of annihilation are not sequential but simultaneous, folded into the body of the present. The future, too, is marked by suffering’s anticipation. The uncertainty of war—will there be peace, reconstruction, justice? —creates a temporal dislocation, where hope and despair coexist uneasily. Suffering, in this sense, is not only physical but existential, a confrontation with the absurdity of existence that Albert Camus described as the human condition’s fundamental question: why persist in the face of such pain? The Absurdity and Meaning of Suffering Camus’s philosophy of the absurd offers a lens through which to view the Russo-Ukrainian War. The conflict, like all wars, is absurd in its senselessness: the destruction of lives, homes, and cultures for the sake of geopolitical ambition or imperial nostalgia. Yet, within this absurdity, individuals and communities strive to create meaning. The Ukrainian resistance—embodied in the defiance of ordinary citizens, the courage of volunteers, and the tenacity of artists who paint murals amidst ruins—reflects what Camus called “revolt,” the refusal to succumb to despair. This revolt is not a denial of suffering but an embrace of it as a condition of existence, a refusal to let the absurd dictate the terms of life. For Ukrainians, meaning emerges from the act of survival itself. The mother who walks miles to safety with her children, the farmer who clears landmines from his fields, the poet who writes of loss and resilience—these are acts of defiance against the absurdity of war. They echo Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy, which posits that meaning can be found even in the most unbearable suffering. In the bombed-out streets of Bucha or the occupied territories of Kherson, meaning is forged in the small acts of resistance: sharing bread, rebuilding homes, or simply refusing to forget who they are. The Ethical Demand of Suffering Suffering, as Levinas reminds us, is not merely a personal experience but an ethical summons. The face of the suffering Other—whether a Ukrainian child orphaned by war or a Russian dissident imprisoned for speaking out—demands a response. In the Russo-Ukrainian War, this ethical demand is complicated by the asymmetry of power and agency. Ukraine’s suffering is visible, tangible, broadcast in images of burning cities and fleeing refugees. Russia’s suffering, by contrast, is often hidden, internalized, or denied, suppressed by a state that thrives on silence. Yet both forms of suffering call for recognition, for an ethics that transcends borders and ideologies. Levinas’s concept of the face suggests that to encounter the Other’s suffering is to be responsible for it, not in a causal sense but in a moral one. The global response to the war—sanctions, humanitarian aid, protests—reflects this responsibility, however imperfectly. But the ethical demand extends beyond material support to the act of witnessing. The Land as a Body of Suffering The body of suffering extends beyond the human to the land itself. Ukraine’s fields, once golden with wheat, are now scarred by tank tracks and littered with unexploded ordnance. The Black Sea coast, a place of beauty and sustenance, is choked with mines and debris. The land, like the human body, bears the marks of war’s violence, its ecosystems disrupted, its soil poisoned. This environmental suffering is not ancillary but integral to the war’s tragedy, a reminder of humanity’s interconnectedness with the earth. In philosophical terms, the land’s suffering evokes Martin Heidegger’s concept of Being-in-the-world, where the human is not separate from but entangled with their environment. The destruction of Ukraine’s landscapes is not merely a strategic loss but an ontological one, a diminishment of the world in which Ukrainians dwell. Yet, like the human body, the land also resists. Farmers plant crops amidst ruins, communities reclaim shelled villages, and nature itself persists, with sunflowers pushing through cracked earth. This resilience mirrors the human spirit, suggesting a shared capacity for endurance. Transcendence Through Suffering Can suffering, in its brutality, lead to transcendence? The Russo-Ukrainian War offers no easy answers. For some, suffering is a crucible, forging new forms of solidarity, identity, and purpose. The global outpouring of support for Ukraine, from volunteers in Poland to crowdfunding campaigns for drones, reflects a transcendence of national boundaries, a recognition of shared humanity. In Ukraine, the war has galvanized a collective identity, uniting diverse regions and languages in a common struggle. This transcendence is not romantic; it is born of necessity, of the need to survive and rebuild. For others, suffering remains an abyss, a descent into despair or nihilism. Here, philosophy falters, for no theory can fully account for the ineffable weight of individual suffering. Yet, even in this darkness, there is a flicker of possibility. As Søren Kierkegaard argued, despair can be a gateway to faith—not necessarily religious, but a faith in the possibility of meaning, in the persistence of the human spirit.