The war in Ukraine has broken some friendships and family ties – but the “ethic of care” has strengthened other relationships

War does more than displace civilians or kill them. When wars are fought in residential areas, they become part of the reckoning of just getting through the day.

During the war in Ukraine, now six months old, my friends and colleagues there held Zoom meetings between air raid alerts. At a recent meeting, I noticed that one of them was speaking from a shower stall, the most heavily reinforced part of their apartment. Professors who defend their country tell me about evaluating student work in between military exercises and many other daily adaptations. Meanwhile, the grim reality of war crimes against civilians continues.

As an anthropologist, I have studied the experience of Ukrainians during armed conflict since Russia seized Crimea in 2014. My current research deals with the effect of military violence on everyday life, personal relationships, and values.

Between 2015 and 2017, I traveled extensively in the country, participating in daily life and interviewing over 150 people, focusing particularly on how people who have been displaced from Crimea and Donbas are coping with the conflict.

People have repeatedly told me that one of the most troubling features of conflict is how it disrupts personal relationships. Civilians found themselves reassessing their personal ethics as they struggled to prioritize competing duties under the most challenging conditions.

Competing loves

Research on the effects of war on civilians has traditionally focused on psychological trauma rather than interpersonal outcomes. Yet among the internally displaced people I interviewed, nearly 70% had lost contact with friends, family or romantic partners, and this was among their main concerns.

The first reason was political: relations suffered because people took opposite sides. Take Larissa – who, like all my interviewees, I call by a pseudonym out of concern for their safety. Her mother and sister supported her financially and eventually went to work for the separatist governments in eastern Ukraine. She held them responsible for the death of her son, who was shot — by forces led by leaders her mother and sister helped elect, with bullets they helped pay for — after he joined Ukrainian forces.

The second reason was competing responsibilities to others, such as getting children to safety versus staying to care for adults who refused to leave. A third reason was the physical separation: displacement strained even strong bonds. And a fourth explanation was that trauma makes it difficult to maintain some relationships.

The second most common factor—competing responsibilities—is particularly interesting. Couples told me they had to balance the competing demands placed on them by their political beliefs with responsibility for aging parents and children, along with the bonds they shared with each other. A specific example is Ludmila, who sent her children to live with their grandparents so she could run a shelter she and her husband had set up on the front lines. Her husband was a pastor who ministered to the displaced and they formed a close team. Other couples found it more difficult to find a common path through the conflict.

Real world solutions

In times of war, people face difficult choices about who to care for. Philosophers and anthropologists who study how people deal with messy moral dilemmas in real life find that they often base their decisions on their obligations to others rather than on general principles of what is “right” and “wrong.” Ethical imperatives such as “if X, then Y” are not appropriate for the decisions faced by civilians in a war zone.

This theory of relational or caring ethics suggests that duties derive less from rules than from relationships, making them difficult to codify. The bottom line, according to these thinkers, is that deliberation is based less on abstract principle than on empathy, and that relationships have a value often overlooked in moral philosophy and international relations.

How does this insight help us understand the lives of civilians during the war in Ukraine? My research documents how people have become embroiled in a conflict that has no side line.

I learned of people making herculean efforts to deliver food and first aid supplies to the front, often using their own resources. Sure, it was defensive and nationally motivated, but it’s also interpersonal. Take Aleksandra, whose father volunteered to fight in 2015. The Ukrainian army had issued him stiff leather boots that were too big. Alexandra worked hard to buy lighter ones in his size. She then provided him with a bulletproof vest, camouflage, a knife and special night vision goggles. When we spoke, she was trying to find tactical gloves to prevent the gun from slipping out of his sweaty hands and causing self-injury. Her daily life was organized around providing for her father.

Alexandra told me that she was not as concerned about her own exodus, or even the outcome of the conflict, as she was about her father’s survival. These decisions are at the heart of the ‘ethics of care’. Prioritizing his father’s well-being and that of his nation over his own meant abandoning his university studies and job search and accepting that as a sniper he could kill former neighbors and friends.

Key year

After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the stakes only got higher. This to civilians looked like making homemade Molotov cocktails, assembling roadblocks called “hedgehogs”; and destroying road signs to disorient Russian forces.

All this is more than nationalism: it points to a realignment of values ​​and priorities on a daily level. One example is the Black Tulip or Cargo 200 groups, which retrieved corpses from behind enemy lines until the Ukrainian government was unable to do so. As I explain in my forthcoming book Everyday War, they were willing to go into rebel-held territory for days at a time to restore dignity to the dead, despite the cost to their psyches and their families.

The recovery teams did their work partly out of patriotism. But they also felt a duty to the non-belligerents in the Russian-occupied territories. A few years ago, when an aid volunteer I interviewed discovered that the authorities in the occupied territories in the east did not allow the importation of drugs such as insulin, he thought: What, besides insulin, needs to be kept cool? Dead bodies! He rushed to buy clean body bags so he could smuggle insulin into vans that drove in empty to take the bodies away.

My main point is not that people like this were altruistic or even nationalist, but that they balanced caring for people they never met with caring for themselves and loved ones. Relationships reveal how priorities overlap, intersect, and are constantly reassessed.

Ukrainians who have been forcibly displaced are deeply concerned about their relationships, but they also report unprecedented levels of care from people they don’t know. Paradoxically, the places where military conflict infiltrates living spaces are also places where care flourishes.