WELCOME TO THE METAPHYSICAL WAR

The ongoing conflict is fundamentally a war of spirit against spirit, between two mutually exclusive visions of what it means to be human

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To understand the latest fears about the possible escalation of the Russian attack on Ukraine into a full nuclear war, one should go back to the beginning of the conflict—all coordinates were set at that point. The wager that sustained Russian aggression was clearly formulated by Dmitry Medvedev, a former Russian president who now serves as deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council. In early 2023, he said that “the U.S.-led NATO military alliance would be too scared of a 'nuclear apocalypse' to directly enter the conflict in response to Russia using tactical nuclear weapons”:

“I believe that NATO will not directly intervene in the conflict even in this situation. After all, the security of Washington, London, Brussels is much more important for the North Atlantic Alliance than the fate of a dying Ukraine that no one needs. [...] The supply of modern weapons is just a business for Western countries. Overseas and European demagogues are not going to perish in a nuclear apocalypse. Therefore, they will swallow the use of any weapon in the current conflict.”

The presupposition of this claim is full sovereignty of a state: in Western commercialized society, one’s own state or nation is no longer something worth dying for, while a state is fully sovereign only if its citizens are ready to die for it. Recall Putin’s words:"In order to claim some kind of leadership—I am not even talking about global leadership, I mean leadership in any area—any country, any people, any ethnic group should ensure their sovereignty. Because there is no in-between, no intermediate state: either a country is sovereign, or it is a colony, no matter what the colonies are called."From these lines, it is clear that, in Putin's view, Ukraine falls into the latter category: it is a colony, no matter what it is called—or even less, a pseudo-entity of a non-existent nation that doesn’t deserve any kind of sovereignty.

Here we unexpectedly enter the domain of philosophy: Putin’s and Medvedev’s words clearly echo the most famous passage in Hegel’s Phenomenology, the dialectic of master and servant. If, in the confrontation between two self-consciousnesses engaged in a struggle for life and death, each side is ready to go to the end in risking its life, then there is no winner—one dies, and the other survives but without another to recognize it. The whole history of freedom and recognition—in short, the whole of history and human culture—can take place only with an original compromise: in the eye-to-eye confrontation, one side (the future servant) “averts its eyes”; it is not ready to go to the end. Medvedev presumes that the decadent hedonist West will avert its eyes; however, what complicates the situation is that, as we know from the Cold War, in a nuclear confrontation there is no winner—both sides disappear.