Thoughts on Russia, Ukraine, Evil, and the Future of Our Species

Prologue – Circling Russia and the Nature of Evil

Artificial Intelligence, appearing this year in what the Germans would call my Umfeld — my environment — in a multitude of ways is giving me the writing and thinking assistance for which I’ve always craved.

This therefore is perhaps the address I wish I could have given to the GB-Russia Society when I spoke to them in 2019, pre-Covid and in-person at Pushkin House, about my psychotherapist’s perspective on the trauma of the Russian experience and how it informs today.

It was not my best moment, by a long way, and brought home, with no little subsequent shame, how much I struggle – perhaps it’s my autism? – with long-form coherent thought. The ideas are there, but the writing has always been agony, and often less than impressive.

ChatGPT has changed all that, quite radically. This is the post it helped me put together today. Whatever your response as reader, the building of this piece – taking perhaps half an hour to set up, a minute for the bot to write and a day’s continued work for me to edit, adjust and complete – blew me away.

So, let’s get going. It’s not short!

The Long Shadow of 1968

I have spent most of my life circling the Russian world — not just as student and journalist, but as a kind of fascinated, grieving witness to a civilisation that has never quite made peace with itself.

For nearly sixty years I’ve watched Russia and the nations around it, both to the West and the East, struggle with the ghosts of their pasts, and as I have gone deeper into the world of psychotherapy and EMDR, I’ve come to see those ghosts as profoundly psychological — old wounds replayed on a grand geopolitical stage.

My own conscious journey with this began in 1968 with a first visit to East Berlin, a grey and broken half-city which still graphically wore the wounds of war and of regime neglect. It was 15 years since Russian tanks put down a worker’s uprising in the then German Democratic Republic, and barely two decades after the end of World War Two.

It was also just two months before Soviet and Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia, just over the border from where, between leaving school and going on to study Russian and German at university, I was doing my West Germany gap year in the small Franconian town of Bamberg.

Of course I didn’t know it then, but the scene was set for much of a later life spent living and reporting the world of the Cold War to Bamberg’s East.

Moral Sovereignty and the Central-European Lineage

As a politically innocent 18-year-old, I recall sensing already then how the Soviet empire worked. In 1968 in Czechoslovakia, a theme was being played out that echoes directly onto what Putin is doing with Ukraine today.

Not just that a nation and its people were crushed. It was that an idea — of moral sovereignty, of becoming — was crushed under the weight of tanks and slogans.

There’s a Central-European moral lineage to this, from Milan Kundera and Václav Havel through Czesław Miłosz and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to my old friend Timothy Garton Ash, all of whom have described the Prague Spring as not merely a political revolt but a defence of the right of a people, and a culture, to live in truth.

In the decades that followed, I found myself living and working across that scarred world of Soviet (in essence, Russian) control: in Leipzig in the early seventies, in East and West Berlin at the tail end of the decade, then in Europe’s old heartland of old Austro-Hungary, Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia, with long spells before and after of reporting from Moscow itself.

Each place had its own texture of fear, and its own small rebellions of dignity. In the cities of the region I saw what it meant for a society to go grey — not (as ChatGPT suggests) as an aesthetic choice but as a survival response.

Beijing’s Different Revolution

Then came China. From 1984 to 1987, I spent three years reporting from Beijing for the BBC, watching a very different kind of revolution unfold — quieter, more pragmatic, and far more strategic.

Where the Soviet Union and its satellite regimes to the immediate west stagnated in paranoia, China in the ‘80s was opening its windows to let in the air.

Markets were loosening, artists beginning to experiment again, a whole population shedding the sober blues and greens of Maoist times and risking to listen to Western music both classical and pop (Wham in Beijing being one of my first big stories…).

Whatever the alarm of the old hardliners (who of course reasserted control at the end of that decade), there was, both for me as Western reporter and for so many of those I interviewed, a buzz of real excitement — a sense that history might, for once, be moving towards light rather than darkness.

Tiananmen: Steel Against Idealism

When I returned to Beijing in 1989, to cover Mikhail Gorbachev’s ground-breaking visit, the optimism was peaking. On Tiananmen Square following the death of former reformist leader Hu Yaobang, students were gathered, less in hatred than in hope. They wanted honesty, not vengeance; transparency, not (at least explicitly) overthrow.

In the May of that year, I took my Sony Professional cassette machine to record the chants and stories of a million people in the square, listening to that collective yearning take shape. With unfortunate journalistic timing, I returned home to the UK just a few days before the tanks went in, at a moment when few of us believed the worst was going to happen.

When it did, it was that same sound of despair — the grinding of steel against idealism, a mechanised denial of vulnerability.

Yet even then – and bear with me at this point as I pivot back to Russia – I had a strong sense of China’s trauma having a different flavour, seeking control through order, not through humiliation; a kind of cold pragmatism rather than the moral self-destruction that so often marks Russia’s path.

Both systems feared chaos. China, it seems, channels its fear into management. Russia turns its pain outward, into destruction.

The Collective Psyche of a Wounded Civilization

All these experiences have shaped how I have come to view Russia and the Russians, not just as a political entity but as a kind of collective psyche — a civilisation that has never found a way to metabolise its pain.

The Russian state, in its various forms, has long operated as a trauma system. Its default is control, its emotional baseline fear. This is of course not unique to Russia, but Russia has refined it into an art form: the moral inversion where suffering becomes proof of virtue, and cruelty a kind of love.

Like so many others, I have lived and still love the other Russia too: the warmth; the hospitality; the clustering of families in a million kitchens to listen, in Soviet days, to the BBC or Radio Liberty; the reemergence of kindness after the Soviet system fell as – a small but telling point – drivers began to stop their cars to let an older pedestrian couple cross the road. Unimaginable in Soviet times.

When that couple last visited Russia just seven short years ago, in geopolitical terms another world altogether, my wife Jutta and I felt as we travelled from Moscow to the Volga and around the Golden Ring, up to Novgorod Velikiy/The Great, to St Petersburg and to the wonderful wooden churches of Kizhi, how that better Russia was pushing up through the cracks — polite, orderly, almost gentle.

For a moment, it seemed possible that the 20^th century’s long winter might be ending. But when underlying pain remains unhealed, old patterns, like childhood trauma, reassert themselves.

From the vantage point of EMDR therapy — my second professional life after journalism — I can’t help but see nations the way I see individuals.

When early wounds are not acknowledged, they fester. The energy of shame or humiliation doesn’t vanish; it gets projected outward. A child who felt belittled can become an adult who dominates. A society that feels abandoned or humiliated becomes a state that invades. You can trace the same psychological grammar from the family system to the Kremlin.

Interviewing Milošević: Encountering Evil

Shading forward in this essay to a consideration of the good and bad things that people do and are, I vividly remember interviewing Slobodan Milošević in Belgrade at the last conference in Belgrade in January 1990 of the then ruling League of Communists of Yugoslavia as that state crumbled into violence, and feeling — yes literally — in the presence of evil.

Milošević for me embodied in grotesque miniature how old and unresolved trauma will resurface and have its way.

Both his parents died by suicide, and his adulthood can be understood perhaps as an act of perpetual revenge against a world that had shamed him. His wars against Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo were theatres of projection — as Lacan and Fromm might put it, an attempt to cleanse the self by destroying the mirror.

I am not a religious person, and at that point had not embarked on my complex psychotherapeutic journey. But evil was the word that came to me unbidden at that cold night hour, three o’clock in the morning minutes after the Slovene and Croatian delegations had walked out and the stage was set for the wars that followed.

As I recorded Milošević’s voice, observing his strangely innocent-looking baby face and feeling the almost physical coldness of his presence, evil was the word that came to me – and as a BBC journalist, I simply did not know what to do with it. Knowing how it would be misunderstood, I never used it in my reporting.

Putin and the Trauma of Fragmentation

That word has come back to me so many times in these past three-and-a-half years, following as I do very closely the war on Ukraine and listening to the broadcasts of journalists like Vladimir Solovyov as they call nightly for nuclear annihilation of Western Europe, reminding us listeners with almost every breath of the power and wisdom of Putin the Верховный главнокомандующий, the Supreme Commander-in-Chief.

Unable to bear the loss of imperial and personal coherence, Putin and those who support his war, whether actively in their thinking or passively in their not-thinking – enact the trauma of fragmentation. Russia does to its neighbours what it has so long done to itself.

Russia’s Century of Brutality

I scarcely need to write this, but the brutality of Russian and Soviet history is staggering.

In just one century, think of the terror that followed the 1917 revolution; the purges of the 1930s; the Gulag archipelago and the forced famines; the collusion with Hitler in the occupation of Poland and the murder of some 20,000 Poles at Katyn; the Great Patriotic War as Russia calls World War Two; and so much more.

Trauma experienced and trauma inflicted, not simply political decisions and crimes, but symptoms of a deeper disorder.

Much earlier of course, under the Mongol yoke and earlier Tsars, cruelty in Russia was institutionalised as necessity. Russian culture absorbed it, then mythologised it. Watch Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev: the genius, the faith, the unspeakable violence — all woven together in a tapestry of fatalism. The Russian soul as it likes to call itself, русская душа, carries beauty and savagery in the same breath.

Defining Evil: From Arendt to Nietzsche

But coming back to terminology, there is a danger in calling this evil, at least in the theological sense. Simplistically thus to label a person or a nation is to stop trying to understand it. I prefer Hannah Arendt’s framing: evil as the absence of thinking, the refusal to take moral responsibility, the turning away from what one knows to be true.

By that standard, the invasion of Ukraine is evil not because it is Russian, but because it is unnecessary. Unnecessary suffering, as Nietzsche argues, is surely the purest form of wrong.

Still, the word evil does retain a kind of power. If we use it sparingly — to describe acts or systems that corrode the conditions for life — then Russia’s century of self-inflicted wounds, culminating now in this war, surely qualifies. To wage an unprovoked war in the middle of a planetary climate emergency is to double down on dysfunction. It is to insist that domination matters more than survival.

Nuclear Theatrics and the Pathology of Power

And nowhere is that dysfunction more naked than in Putin’s most recent nuclear theatrics — the flaunting of weapons like the Burevestnik or Poseidon, fantastical devices designed less for use than for terror.

These are the tools of an individual and collective psyche that has lost its grip on reality, and it’s not just pop-psychology to see them as symbols of omnipotence masking a deep personal and collective insecurity.

Such weapons are unusable in any rational sense; their detonation would destroy not only the enemy but Russia itself. This is the psychology of the abuser who threatens suicide to control those around him (as Judith Lewis Herman notes among many others) — a pathology of power that confuses annihilation with agency.

Empire and the Illusion of Betterment

Of course, use by anyone of similar weapons would have a similar outcome. And there are those who argue that once-and-former superpowers are as bad as each other, and point to a long history of imperial overreach on the part of the West and the United States.

As the great-great-nephew one of Britain’s leading empire-builders of the late 19^th Century Lord Lugard, a product myself of complex empire with both parents born in British India, I would beg to suggest that there is a difference.

Even when America – as in earlier times the Great Britain of my own heritage – blunders (and, yes, it and we have blundered often) and however misguided and even catastrophic the interventions might be, there remains I would argue, paradoxically, a belief in the possibility of betterment.

The Repetition Compulsion: From Prague to Kyiv

Russia’s motivation, by contrast, so often seems to arise from the need to undo rather than to build — to drag others down to its level of despair. Both are forms of delusion, but one at least gestures towards hope; the other toward annihilation.

Consider again Russia’s long litany: East Germany in 1953; the invasion of Hungary in 1956 and the execution of prime minister Imre Nagy and others of his government; Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the humiliation of Alexander Dubcek; Poland in 1981 and General Jaruzelski’s imposition, to forestall yet another Russian invasion, of martial law on his own people.

For half a century, under restraint from Moscow on any form of true national agency, each time a neighbouring society reached for autonomy, not just in political obvious political rebellion but in seeking seriously to challenge grey ordinariness of ideological emptiness, it was crushed.

The Soviet and local regime response (just think of East Germany’s Stasi secret police) was always the same: fear disguised as strength. The state, unable to tolerate difference, silenced it.

And now, decades later, the tragic pattern repeats in Ukraine.

In February 2022, Putin imagined a swift “Czechoslovak solution” (a blindingly clear parallel curiously absent from much Western analysis of this war): decapitate the government in Kiev, install a puppet regime, declare “normalisation.” But Ukraine refused to play the role assigned to it. The trauma script was broken, at least for now.

Gorbachev’s Therapeutic Experiment

Mikhail Gorbachev, for all his flaws, tried something unprecedented when he assumed power in Moscow in the mid-80s— an honest reckoning. Glasnost and perestroika were, at heart, therapeutic experiments: the attempt to speak the unspeakable, to reorganise the psyche around truth rather than repression.

But the system was too brittle. The pain too deep. What we can now see as a brief moment of openness collapsed into an old and deeply familiar Russian reflex of control. The opportunity for integration was lost, and what followed — the corruption, the nostalgia for empire, the cult of the strongman — was the predictable backlash of a psyche that had glimpsed its vulnerability, and recoiled.

Ukraine as Psychological Event

Ukraine, in that sense, is not just a geopolitical crisis. It is a psychological event in the history of humanity. It reveals how, when the work of mourning is left undone, nations like people can relapse into violence.

The Russian invasion is not about NATO or security guarantees. It is about an unbearable identity wound: the loss of empire, the loss of self. And like any untreated trauma, it demands repetition — even at the cost of destruction.

When I look at this through the lens of human survival that I bring to all my work with EMDR therapy, it’s hard not to feel despair.

We are facing an escalating climate crisis, accelerating technological chaos, and the ever-more-rapid unravelling of the systems that sustain life. And yet here we are, wasting our final years of relative stability in another imperial psychodrama.

A Species-Level Failure of Imagination

The Russian war on Ukraine is not just a moral catastrophe; it is a species-level failure of imagination. To choose war now, in this context, is to choose extinction.

I sometimes wonder whether civilisation itself might be traumatised beyond repair — caught in its own feedback loop of denial and projection. We speak endlessly of progress, yet our reflexes remain primitive.

The climate crisis is met with political theatre. Artificial Intelligence and biotechnology gallop ahead while our moral development stagnates. Empires rise, fall, and reincarnate under new flags. The old scripts persist: domination, humiliation, revenge.

If there is a lesson in all of this, it is not that Russia is uniquely damned, but that it offers a mirror to the human condition.

Every nation carries its unhealed past; every psyche contains its shadow. Russia’s tragedy is that it confuses pain with greatness. Its leaders mistake endurance for virtue. The result is a pattern of endless reenactment, where suffering becomes both cause and justification.

Epilogue – Hope’s Irrational Flicker

Yet, amid the bleakness, there remains a possibility — faint, fragile, but real. Healing begins when the story is told differently. When the victim and the perpetrator cease to be opposing roles and become aspects of the same fractured self.

That is what EMDR teaches on the level of the individual, and perhaps it can also apply to the collective. To integrate the wound, one must first feel it fully. Russia has never done that. (Nor, for that matter, has much of the West.)

So we stand here, on the edge humanity’s final act, watching the old trauma patterns play out once again. History has become therapy gone wrong: re-exposure without reprocessing. The question is whether we — as a species, as a civilisation — can still learn, or whether we will repeat until extinction closes the file.

When I think back over my six decades of bearing witness — the Soviet tanks in Prague, the grey streets of East Berlin and Bucharest, the chants on Tiananmen Square, the more recent cautious smiles in Moscow’s streets — I am struck by how little changes and how bravely hope refuses to die.

Perhaps that is humanity’s only saving grace: the stubborn, irrational flicker that insists on kindness even when cruelty seems the law of the world.

To call Russia’s actions evil is to simplify; to excuse them is to collude. Somewhere between those poles lies the work of understanding — the slow, painful task of seeing how trauma metastasises through time.

If we can learn that lesson at scale, perhaps there is still a future worth speaking of — a kind of long-delayed reprocessing of history itself.

For now, and however this conflict unfolds, Ukraine fights not only for its land but for the possibility that humanity might still evolve — that we might, at last, break the pattern.

Mark Brayne is a psychotherapist, former BBC and Reuters foreign correspondent, and director of EMDR Focus. Having lived and worked across Central and Eastern Europe and China since the 1970s, he writes at the intersection of trauma, history, and the human condition.

Suggested Bibliography

Primary Lived Sources
Brayne, Mark. Personal field notes and reporting experiences (Moscow, East Berlin, Leipzig, Bucharest, Beijing, 1968–1989).
Brayne, Mark. EMDR Focus materials and ai-EMDR framework (2010–2025).

On Russia, History, and Empire
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Viking Press, 1963.
Conquest, Robert. The Great Terror: A Reassessment. Oxford University Press, 1990.
Figes, Orlando. Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia. Penguin, 2002.
Figes, Orlando. Revolutionary Russia 1891–1991: A History. Pelican, 2014.
Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times. Oxford University Press, 1999.
Gorbachev, Mikhail. Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World. Harper & Row, 1987.
Hosking, Geoffrey. Russia and the Russians: A History. Harvard University Press, 2001.
Service, Robert. Russia: From Tsarism to the Twenty-First Century. Penguin, 2009.
Snyder, Timothy. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Basic Books, 2010.
Snyder, Timothy. The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. Tim Duggan Books, 2018.
Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace.

On China and Tiananmen
Brook, Timothy. Quelling the People: The Military Suppression of the Beijing Democracy Movement. Oxford University Press, 1992.
Nathan, Andrew J., and Perry Link (eds.). The Tiananmen Papers. PublicAffairs, 2001.
Wasserstrom, Jeffrey N. China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know. Oxford University Press, 2010.

On Psychology, Trauma, and Systems
Bowlby, John. Attachment and Loss. Vols. 1–3. Penguin, 1969–1980.
van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score. Viking, 2014.
Shapiro, Francine. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing: Basic Principles, Protocols, and Procedures. Guilford Press, 2018 (3rd ed.).
Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence. Basic Books, 1992.
Yalom, Irvin D. Love’s Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy. Basic Books, 1989.
Zimbardo, Philip. The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. Random House, 2007.

On the Contemporary Context
Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. Simon & Schuster, 2014.
Lovelock, James. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford University Press, 1979.
McNeill, J. R., and Peter Engelke. The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene. Harvard University Press, 2016.
Harari, Yuval Noah. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. Harvill Secker, 2016.

Films and Cultural Touchstones
Tarkovsky, Andrei. Andrei Rublev. Mosfilm, 1966.
Tarkovsky, Andrei. Stalker. Mosfilm, 1979.
Zhao, Liang. Behemoth. CNEX, 2015 (for modern China’s moral exhaustion).