In the title of Susan Sontag’s book there is one word that, after February 24, 2022, can no longer be read as before. Others. Regarding the Pain of Others. The word seems to promise distance: there is us, there is them, there is the photograph, the screen, the page, the newsfeed, the safe position of the spectator. But in the case of Russia’s war against Ukraine, this division begins to lie. Ukrainian pain is not ours — it cannot be appropriated, cannot be turned into material for Russian moral maturation, cannot be made into a mirror in which we finally see our own tormented face. And yet to call it simply “other” is no longer possible either. It is produced by a state that speaks in our name, in the language of our power, out of our history, through our taxes, our silence, our fear, our habit of living beside violence and calling it politics.
The Russian spectator before Ukrainian suffering is not an ordinary spectator of someone else’s catastrophe. He is not inside this pain, as a Ukrainian is, but neither is he outside it, like a distant observer. His position is intermediate, and therefore morally uncomfortable. He looks at a destroyed house and knows that this house was destroyed not by a natural disaster, not by an impersonal “war,” not by history in general, but by a force that came out of the same political space in which he himself once learned not to ask unnecessary questions, grew accustomed to the television in the next room, to the faces of officials, to the words “stability,” “greatness,” “our interests,” “their provocation.” That is why compassion here does not carry him beyond what is happening. It only poses the question: what exactly connects his calm to someone else’s pain?
It is important to say this at once: “Russian” in this text is not blood, not an ethnographic belonging, not a mystical guilt by fact of birth. It is a place of looking. An address. A position on the map. The Russian spectator may be someone who lives in Russia, someone who has left it, someone who speaks Russian and feels how this language has been seized by orders, justifications, mockery, the bureaucracy of death. This is not necessarily a person who wanted the war. But it is a person forced to admit that the war did not come to Ukraine out of nowhere. It came from a world where it had been possible, for too long, not to look.
Sontag begins her discussion with the question of photographs of war, of what images of other people’s bodies, destroyed houses, burned-out cities do to us. In her book, photographs do not simply show suffering. They test the spectator. They test who he is, where he stands, what he wants to see and what he desperately does not want to know. Virginia Woolf, whom Sontag addresses, hoped that photographs of war should produce the same horror in everyone. Here are bodies, here are ruins, here is what war does. How could one argue? How could one fail to understand?
Sontag answers more complicatedly. A photograph is not pure evidence. It always waits for a caption. It waits for someone to say: these are ours or theirs; this is a crime or a necessity; these are victims or “losses”; this is a house or an “object”; this is a child or a “staged scene.” War tears and destroys, but then language arrives and completes the work. It explains, erases, recaptions. It makes death fit for use.
Sontag writes about photographs of war, but the further one reads, the clearer it becomes: she is interested not so much in photography as in the distance between pain and the one who sees it. The photograph is only one form of that distance. Today, in its place, there may be a video from a Telegram channel, a story, a short clip, an eyewitness message, a surveillance-camera frame, a satellite map, a photograph of a kitchen without a wall. The device is not what matters. What matters is the position of the spectator. Who is looking? From where? What does this distance allow him?
A Ukrainian looks at a destroyed house differently, because it may be his house, his city, his street, his relatives, his future. For him, the image is not entirely an image. It is not separated from life by a reliable frame. It is not simply “news.” It is a possible version of his own fate. Even if the house is in another city, even if the dead are strangers, the structure of the threat is shared. The strike may change address. The siren may sound here. The message may arrive at night. A photograph of someone else’s apartment without a wall is not “someone else’s” in the safe sense of the word: it says not only “this happened,” but also “this could happen to you.”
A European looks differently. For him this is someone else’s war, but too close to remain an abstract piece of news. It disturbs the border of his own peace, returns a history that he wanted to think of as museum-bound, raises questions about the price of freedom, about fear of Russia, about comfort built on postponed decisions. A European can sympathize, help, grow tired, argue about aid, vote for politicians who either understand the danger or trade in fatigue. But his distance is the distance of an external witness. He looks at a crime committed by another state against another country.
The Russian spectator looks from the place from which the violence came. This does not automatically make him a soldier, executioner, informer, artilleryman. But it does not allow him to occupy the innocent position of a human being in general. His gaze is already historically stained. He looks not simply at someone else’s misfortune, but at a misfortune his state produces as a political fact, as a military operation, as a television plot, as an object of pride, as a reason for silence. He may be against it. He may be horrified. He may cry over photographs of Bucha, Mariupol, Kharkiv, Dnipro. But tears do not change the direction of a missile. And, more painfully still, they do not cancel the question of why he is on this side of the screen.
Not looking is also a privilege. Closing the tab, turning off the phone, leaving a Telegram channel, saying “I can’t take this anymore” — all these are gestures of a person to whom war comes in the form of information. A notification can be switched off. A channel can be muted. The newsfeed can be replaced by music, a series, a household task, illness, work, depression, caring for a child, anything at all. This is not always cynicism; sometimes it really is the only way not to fall apart. A person is not made for continuous horror. Shock has a limit. Sontag writes about this very soberly: shock evaporates, horror becomes habitual, people have defenses against unpleasant information.
But in the Russian case, this defense ceases to be merely psychological. It becomes political. Because a person to whom war comes as a notification has the freedom not to look, while a person to whom war comes as a missile has no such freedom. You cannot mute an explosion. You cannot leave a city if the city is surrounded. You cannot scroll past the death of someone close. The spectator’s fatigue changes nothing in the position of the one who has found himself inside the event.
Here the conversation about compassion becomes less comfortable. The Russian spectator often wants his horror to count as an action. He wants his disgust at the war already to separate him from the state, the army, the television, the neighbors, from those who write “they deserved it,” from those who rejoice at the strikes, from those who remain silent not out of fear but out of consent. And there is human truth in this desire. No one wants to be fused with a crime he did not commit with his own hands. No one wants his inner “no” to turn out to be nothing. But Sontag is dangerous precisely because she does not allow feeling to be exchanged so easily for innocence.
She writes about compassion as a feeling that can announce our innocence and our powerlessness. We sympathize — which means, supposedly, that we are not involved in what causes suffering. We are horrified — which means we are not on the side of evil. We cry — which means we are still human. But compassion can become the last form of self-justification. Especially where a person does not want to think about the connection between his own peace and someone else’s pain.
“It hurts me to look” is not a lie. But it is not yet a position. “I am against the war” matters. But it is not enough if what begins after that phrase is the right not to think any further. “There is nothing I can do” is sometimes true. But often it is a phrase in which powerlessness appoints itself eternal in advance.
The problem is not that the Russian spectator is obliged to live in a state of permanent hysteria. Permanent hysteria quickly becomes another form of emptiness. The problem is that he may confuse the impossibility of endless shock with the right to a moral exit. First horror. Then adaptation. Then “I don’t read the news.” Then “life goes on.” Then “we are all hostages.” Then “well, what can I do?” Then “let’s not talk about politics.” Then “how much longer about Ukraine?” The state does not need everyone to be enthusiastic about the war. It is enough for the war to become a background to which people have grown accustomed.
The fatigue of the aggressor is one of the most vile forms of historical comfort. Not because a person has no right to be tired. He does. Everyone gets tired. Horror destroys the one who looks at it too. But when fatigue becomes the right not to know, not to think, not to connect oneself with what is happening, it begins to work for violence. It turns into a social function. The war continues because some conduct it, others justify it, still others are afraid, a fourth group is tired, a fifth is busy, a sixth says: “it’s not so simple.” And all this variety does not change the common result: the missile flies.
Sontag writes a great deal about captions. An image of a dead child can be used by different sides: “change the caption and use their deaths.” This thought, it seems, describes today not only propaganda, but Russian state speech itself. Russia does not simply destroy Ukrainian cities. It comes after the explosion and changes the sign on the ruin. A destroyed house becomes a “military object.” A killed civilian becomes a “victim of Ukrainian air defense.” An occupied city becomes a “liberated territory.” Deportation becomes “evacuation.” War becomes a “special military operation.” Aggression becomes “self-defense.” Ukrainian resistance becomes “Nazism.”
This is not secondary violence. It is part of the violence. Because death whose caption has been changed ceases to accuse the killer. A wound given a false name becomes fit for consumption. A corpse turns into an argument. A destroyed house — into proof of someone else’s guilt. Tears — into material for the evening broadcast. Propaganda does not necessarily hide suffering. Sometimes it shows it, but shifts the arrows. It says: look how terrible this is — and immediately slips in the wrong address of the criminal.
That is why the Russian spectator faces a task more difficult than simply “looking.” He must refuse the imposed caption. He must not accept “it’s complicated” as final wisdom. He must not hide behind “we don’t know the whole truth.” He must not repeat “but who started it?” as though history cancels responsibility for today’s shot. He must not dissolve aggression in the formula “ordinary people suffer on both sides,” where symmetry becomes a way of hiding the direction of violence. Words must be given back their subject, verb, and object. Russia attacked. The Russian army is destroying Ukrainian cities. Ukrainian civilians are dying from Russian aggression. People had names, homes, plans, mornings, work, love, irritations, habits, unfinished conversations. They must not be left in the language of “losses.”
War de-individualizes a person physically. Sontag observes something terrible: a disfigured body can lose the signs of individuality and even of belonging to the human species. This is not a metaphor but the limit of horror. But Russian violence de-individualizes twice. First it destroys the body, the home, the biography, the city. Then it destroys meaning. People are called “targets,” “objects,” “manpower,” “the local population,” “nationalists,” “those affected by a blast.” War deprives the killed person of a face. Propaganda deprives him of a name. The newsfeed deprives him of duration. The spectator, tired of horror, deprives him of the last thing — attention.
And that is why it is especially dangerous for a Russian author to write about Ukrainian pain. One can describe ruins too beautifully. One can turn destroyed Mariupol into scenery for one’s own conscience. One can turn Bucha into an occasion to speak about Russian guilt, Russian trauma, Russian exile, Russian powerlessness, Russian shame. One can place the Russian back at the center again — no longer as an imperial victor, but as a suffering witness, nobly crushed by his own revelation. This would be another form of appropriation.
Ukrainian pain was not given to us for our moral maturation. It is not educational material for the Russian conscience. It is not material for confession, not a backdrop to a penitential monologue. It is not a mirror in which we finally saw Russia. It is first of all the pain of concrete people to whom Russia has done evil. And if a Russian text about the war has any right to exist at all, it is only on the condition that it does not replace Ukrainian suffering with the Russian experience of that suffering. The Russian spectator may speak about his gaze, but he must remember: his inner crisis is not the main event. This is a difficult limitation, because it is precisely the crisis that makes one write. But perhaps honesty begins with the refusal of beautiful self-exposure. With the recognition that shame is not an action, pain is not compensation, horror is not help. They can be a beginning. But if they become the ending, they serve the same spectator who wants to leave the hall cleansed.
In Russia, people are generally fond of cleansing themselves through suffering. There is an old cultural habit in this: suffering as depth, suffering as the right to a special soul, suffering as proof of human authenticity. But the Ukrainian war requires not depth, but precision. Not “the tragedy of brotherly peoples,” not “a shared misfortune,” not “a historical rupture,” but something simple, almost unbearable: there is an aggressor and there is a country that was attacked. There is a state that destroys, and there are people being destroyed. Too great a love of tragic formulas often turns out to be a way of not uttering the simple sentence.
Russian memory of war should have taught this. But it taught something else. Sontag writes that collective memory is a dubious notion, and here I am fully in solidarity with her, while a collective lesson does exist. In Russia, this lesson was replaced by a cult. “Never again” turned into “we can do it again.” Memory of the victims — into the right to speak in the name of the victims. Horror before war — into a parade. Victory over fascism — into armor against any future guilt. A people accustomed to remembering itself as a liberator proved unable to recognize itself as an aggressor. Any suffering caused by us had to be immediately recaptioned. We could not be killers, because we were used to considering ourselves heirs of the victors. We could not be an empire, because we called our empire security. We could not attack, because in our language we are always only responding.
Thus memory became not an obstacle to war, but its warehouse. From it they took words, faces, songs, grandfathers, films, a banner, school lessons, the intonation of sacred struggle. The Ukrainian present was crushed by the Russian past, which refused to be past. And the Russian spectator, raised inside this memory, often looks at Ukrainian suffering through a layer of justifications prepared in advance. He may even be against the war, but somewhere deep in his language there continue to live formulas that make Ukraine not fully separate, Ukrainian pain not fully real, Russian responsibility not fully one’s own.
In this sense, the war has not passed the Russian spectator by. It simply has not always struck him. Between “not being killed” and “being uninvolved” lies an enormous moral distance, which Russian society tries to pass off as innocence. Yes, many are afraid. Yes, many decided nothing. Yes, in Russia there are repressions, prisons, threats, denunciations, ruined lives, emigration, the breakup of families, fear of return, fear of speech. All this is true. But this truth must not become a curtain behind which Ukraine disappears. Russian suffering from the Russian dictatorship exists. But Ukrainian suffering from Russian aggression is not its subdivision.
Perhaps this is where the thinnest boundary lies. The Russian spectator must give up two convenient roles at once. The role of the innocent humanist who simply mourns the horrors of war. And the role of the chief victim of his own guilt, which turns the conversation about Ukraine into a conversation about his unbearable shame. The first role is too clean. The second is too dramatic. Both once again save the spectator from the map on which “our privileges and their suffering” are located side by side.
What remains? Not purification. Not an eternal scream. Not the demand that one feel equally intensely every day. A person cannot withstand such a regime, and the suffering of another does not become more respected because we destroy ourselves before the screen. What remains is a drier, less beautiful thing: the obligation not to lie about the connection. Not to let the caption replace death. Not to confuse fatigue with the right to exit. Not to use compassion as proof of innocence. Not to make Russian metaphysics out of Ukrainian pain. Not to turn away as though the absence of a gaze cancels what is happening.
Watching won’t wash you clean. This, perhaps, is the main lesson of Sontag for the Russian spectator. One can look not for cleansing, not for moral superiority, not in order to say: “I saw it, therefore I understood.” One must look in order not to let oneself return to innocence. To hold onto the connection one wants to renounce. To remember that distance does not always mean noninvolvement. To remove the false caption from someone else’s death again and again. Ukrainian suffering remains Ukrainian. It cannot be appropriated. Russian responsibility remains Russian. It cannot be washed away with compassion. Between them lies a map one so does not want to read: a map of missile trajectories, linguistic habits, historical myths, state crimes, private fears, comfortable fatigue, belated horror. And on this map the Russian spectator is not off to the side. He is located where looking is already insufficient, but not looking means continuing the old work of blindness.
