Sometimes even conspicuously bad news is an understatement. Though Russian President Vladimir Putin’s violations of Ukraine constitute “crimes against peace” (“aggression”), “crimes of war” and “crimes against humanity,” they are generally understood only as numbered facts. Accordingly, (1) the full measure of Ukrainian victim anguish remains incommunicable; and (2) international law enforcement responses remain inadequate.
This set of limitations is not because of any reportorial or linguistic shortcomings. Rather, it owes to a widely inconspicuous failure, the timeless refusal by observers to experience egregious international harms from “within.” Though it would be impossible for such observers to feel the same inflicted pain as the victims, this irremediable incapacity could still serve a productive purpose: It could remind observers that the perpetrated crimes are even worse than the objective facts suggest.
In Ukraine, victim sufferings scream silently, “from within.” No matter how diligent or well-intentioned the world press may be in covering these sufferings, the absence of an interior perspective has left observers with just a superficial understanding of cumulative harms.
The personal suffering that isn't on the news
Earlier, Sigmund Freud explained this “phenomenological” limitation in more expressly therapeutic terms. Among other things, he recognized that psychological assessments ought never to be exclusively “objective.” Whatever the intrusive limitations of a specific healing enterprise, Freud cautioned each therapist to pay close attention to psyche, or “soul.”
Nonetheless, this Freudian warning is not applicable to current military analyses. By definition, no references to a human “soul” could ever be taken as analytic or scientific. Of course, one could readily acknowledge that Freud never even considered the application of such a concept to the measureless flux of world politics, but we could still reasonably imagine that he would have been sympathetic to the idea.
Freud’s overall understanding of science was never narrowly professional. Always, it was broadly humanistic. Above all, it displayed an imaginative willingness “to look at the world other than from without.”
Following every barbarous Russian attack on Ukrainian noncombatants, we learn the number of fatalities and of those “merely wounded.” What observers can’t ever truly understand are the embedded manifestations of personal suffering. Anterior to language or speech, these manifestations represent what happens “inside” each affected person. Freud would have agreed that even determined attempts at experiencing weltschmerz (“world pain”) through the suffering of other individuals must ultimately come to naught.
What should come next for those who would welcome a more genuine understanding of Russian crimes against Ukraine, that is, an understanding “from within”? Going forward, why should discrepant and widely scattered observers try to discover interiorized meanings of war and genocide if there is no plausible chance of success? Wouldn’t such vain insights merely underscore the immutable limitations of human understanding in geopolitical matters?
Let candor prevail. We humans, whether as observers, bystanders or healers, can’t ever experience the full impact of aggression and genocide inflicted on others. Correspondingly, we ought finally to inquire: Doesn’t this incapacity to put ourselves into the minds and “souls” of suffering victims reveal a relentlessly permanent deficit, one with significant foreign policy implications? At present, might not such irremediable weakness undermine civilization’s urgently needed anti-Putin strategies?
The privacy of pain
The most untranslatable effect of a Russian attack on Ukrainian civilian populations lies in the perpetual privacy of physical pain. Prima facie, such pain is non-transferable. No human language can accurately describe this pain. It is an “unnamable” pain.
There is more. We observers might prefer to think of ourselves as decently empathic persons. Still, fundamentally, we are inevitably “hard-shelled,” beings exiled from the deeply felt suffering of all others. Even within families, boundaries between one individual and another generally lie beyond any personal will to navigate them. Like it or not, these boundaries must remain fixed, daunting, intimidating, and impermeable.
Grasping the idea of the hard and impenetrable barriers of human feeling is prerequisite to international law enforcement. Everyone who is born has to endure physical pain, even when it becomes unendurable. Everyone who lives will concur that bodily anguish cannot only defy the banal syntax of ordinary language; it can destroy such language altogether.
The patent inaccessibility of others’ sufferings, the insufferable privacy of human torment, has far-reaching social, political, and legal implications. In the case of Russia’s criminal assaults against Ukrainian homes, schools, hospitals, and civilian victims – whether by face-to-face killings and bombings or via orchestrated spasms of indiscriminate artillery attacks – this inaccessibility stands in the way of recognizing Putin’s assaults as inexcusable.
In the final analysis, the “suffering distance” between any one person’s own body and the body of another is impossible to cross. Whatever else we may have been taught about empathy and compassion, the unyielding membranes that insulate individual bodies will trump any ritualistic obligation “to care.” Inter alia, this means that no person ought ever to consider Russian crimes against Ukraine as defensible for any reason.
In world politics, as in every other segment of human affairs, all things move in the midst of death. However merciless a particular Russian attack on Ukrainian populations may be on the surface, the true pain of civilian victims remains hidden at a “safe distance.” Never authentically palpable, the full horror of such inflicted pain is blunted by the unalterable shortcomings of human language and human empathy.
Summing up, Russian crimes against humanity in Ukraine are actually more insidious than they appear. Whatever their alleged justifications and scruples, Putin’s killers will remain committed to “patriotic” deliveries of belligerent harms. Unless the rest of the world – especially the United States – takes more seriously the lethal interrelatedness of world politics and the correlative obligations of international law, this refractory dedication will augur a perilous dance macabre.
Ultimately, in all such matters of unique importance, science represents the best method of seeking gainful conclusions. Nonetheless, even science (especially science) must disregard espirit de finesse, the most deeply human content of what is being studied. In the current matter of Russian crimes against Ukraine, however, this subjective content reveals the greater measure of geopolitical and legal significance. It ought, therefore, never be disregarded.
The writer is an emeritus professor of international law at Purdue University. He is the author of many books and scholarly articles on international law, nuclear strategy, nuclear war, and terrorism, including Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; second edition, 2018). lberes@purdue.edu