There is a sentence that ends arguments before they begin: “war is hell, both sides do terrible things, so there is nothing to choose between them.” It sounds like maturity. It is in fact the opposite of looking, a refusal disguised as worldliness, and it collapses the moment you actually examine what is being fought over Ukraine. Because what is happening there is not one war fought by two morally comparable armies. It is two different things at once, occurring on the same map and called by the same name. One is a deliberate, years-long campaign to exterminate a civilian population. The other is a disciplined defense that strikes only military and economic targets. To see them as a single phenomenon — “the war,” with its regrettable excesses on both sides — is already to have lost the thread that connects the facts to any honest judgment.
This essay holds to a principle that sounds, at first, like a “both sides” hedge: a just defender is still bound by the laws of war. It is not a hedge. It is the exact point on which the two sides diverge. The aggressor makes the killing of civilians its policy; the defender keeps the bond and kills no civilians on purpose. The principle does not flatten the difference between them — it is the instrument that measures it.
Two wars, not one
Begin by separating the two things the single word “war” conceals.
The first is a campaign whose chosen targets are people. When a military with the whole map in front of it spends fortunes on apartment blocks and almost nothing of military value, the aiming is not poor — the civilians were the aim. Wave after wave of missiles falls on a city, and in one such salvo the only “military” object struck was a factory making military clothing, worth less than the single missile spent on it, while strikes costing over a billion dollars, and then some six hundred million more, produced a near-zero military result. A force does not spend that to degrade an enemy’s defenses. It spends that to kill a people, and the body of evidence is not a single atrocity but a sustained pattern: in Mariupol alone roughly 2,187 residents killed; a missile into the Amstor shopping mall in Kremenchuk with about a thousand people inside, where only a timely air-raid warning held the dead to around thirteen; the energy grid struck en masse in the deepest cold of winter, a deliberate freezing of millions; hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian children deported to be remade as Russians. As early as mid-2022 the United Nations had already confirmed 4,113 Ukrainian civilians killed — and that number is not a current total but the documented floor, an acknowledged undercount of that one moment, with the killing continued in every year since, on top of tens of thousands more in Syria. The figure has only ever pointed downward toward what could be proven, never upward toward the truth.
The second thing called “war” is the response to the first: an army that strikes the means of making war and the economy that funds it, and does not strike the enemy’s civilians. Ukraine, unlike Russia, has had no recorded case of deliberately killing civilians. That single sentence is the whole of the asymmetry, and everything else in this essay is an attempt to keep it from being argued away.
Once the two are separated, the lazy sentence dissolves. “Both sides do terrible things” is true only in the sense that both sides kill — but one kills civilians as its purpose and the other kills soldiers and burns war factories as its purpose, and the entire moral content of the war lives in that difference. To merge them back into “the war” is not balance. It is the erasure of the only fact that matters.
Stakes: existence against empire
The two ways of fighting are not accidents of national character. They follow from a difference in what each side is fighting for, and the difference is total.
For Ukraine the war is existential. It is a war of independence in the plainest sense — closer to the American Revolution than to any “civil war” — a nation expelling an invader from its own soil. You can read the stake straight off the aggressor’s own declared aims, each of which names the thing it was meant to destroy. “Denazification” meant, openly, the liquidation of Ukraine as such. “Demilitarization” was pursued against a country that has since become one of the best-armed militaries in Europe. “Protecting Donbas” was the slogan under which Mariupol was destroyed. A nationalism that says only “leave us alone” — expel the aggressor and let us keep our own land — is not the expansionist kind. It wants nothing of anyone else’s. It wants to go on existing.
For Russia the war is for nothing real. Every stated aim has produced its own opposite, and what remains when the slogans are stripped away is not a goal but an appetite: the restoration of an empire that the war is in fact dismantling. It leaves Russians worse off, Ukrainians worse off, the world worse off, and satisfies no one but the man who began it. This is the deeper engine of the difference in conduct. A people fighting to exist has every reason to keep its hands clean, because its claim is its survival and its conduct is its claim. A power fighting to impose its order on foreign ground through the destruction of another people has, built into its very purpose, the logic of extermination. The stakes do not merely differ. They run in opposite directions, and the conduct follows the stakes.
One confusion must be cut off here, because the aggressor leans on it. The status of aggressor does not flip when the war reaches the aggressor’s own soil. The Third Reich fighting on German ground in 1945 was still the aggressor; the armies pushing into Germany were not transformed into invaders by crossing a border. So with strikes that reach Russian territory: they do not convert the defender into an aggressor. They are the war coming home to the place it was launched from.
Conduct: who actually kills civilians
Set the two records side by side and the asymmetry is not a matter of degree but of kind.
On one side, the deliberate targeting already described — and a telling pattern in its timing. After the September 2022 Kharkiv counter-offensive routed Russian forces, Russia could not reverse the defeat, so it struck what it could reach: Kharkiv’s CHP-5 and other energy sites, cutting power and water to a city it could no longer take. This was named openly from the top as an “asymmetric answer” — the admission, in the aggressor’s own voice, that the strikes on civilian infrastructure were retaliation for a military failure, not a step toward any military success. The winter campaign was of the same character: a brokered pause used not to seek peace but to stockpile missiles, then a mass strike on the grid timed to the −20 and −25 degree cold. A word exists for engineering the death of a population by cold and hunger, and it is not a metaphor reached for in anger; it is the precise description of a method used once before against Ukrainians and reached for again.
On the other side, restraint that goes beyond the law’s minimum. Ukraine for a long time declined to strike even legitimate Russian military targets — it did not, for instance, hit the airfield in the Kaluga region from which the Kremenchuk strike was launched — holding back under tacit Western understandings about not “over-provoking.” That is an asymmetry of restraint, not of capability: the defender could have struck and chose not to. Where Ukraine does reach into Russia, it reaches for the war economy, for reasons that are structural as much as moral. The economic and military centers funding Russia’s war sit on Russian soil within drone range; Russia, by contrast, cannot reach much of Ukraine’s war base, which lies in Europe. The defender hits what is reachable and legitimate; it does not manufacture civilian targets to make up the difference.
Even the case the aggressor likes to cite cuts the other way. The blasts in Belgorod on 3 July 2022 that killed four were proven to have come from Russia’s own Pantsir-S1 air-defense system — not a Ukrainian strike on civilians at all, but the aggressor’s own weapon falling on the aggressor’s own city, and then offered up as evidence against the side that did not fire it.
The principle, kept honestly
Now the principle that looks like a concession and is in fact the spine of the argument. A just war of national liberation grants no unlimited license. A just army can commit a war crime; being the wronged side does not make its every act innocent. So the test of any act is intent — deliberate killing of civilians on one side of the line, unavoidable harm in the pursuit of a military objective on the other.
History supplies the hard illustration in a single sentence: Hitler’s aggression did not absolve the mass rapes committed by Soviet troops entering Königsberg, because a prior crime by the enemy never converts one’s own crime into something else. That is the principle at its sternest. And it is exactly here that the two sides part, because the principle, applied to this war, returns an answer that is not symmetric at all: Ukraine, unlike Russia, has had no recorded case of deliberately killing civilians. The bond that binds every just defender is a bond Ukraine has actually kept.
That keeping is not luck or temperament; it rests on machinery. There is a military prosecutor’s office created to enforce the laws of war. When Ukrainian forces held territory inside Russia’s Kursk Oblast, there were no recorded abuses of the civilian population there. This is what it looks like when a command does not want atrocities and builds the structure to prevent them — the mirror image of a command for which atrocity is the message. Restraint of this kind is not weakness dressed up as virtue. It is the substance of being right rather than merely aggrieved. A side can be wronged and still become a criminal; what keeps the just side just is that, tested with a defenseless population under its control, it did not.
Legitimate target is not terror
The aggressor’s favorite inversion is to brand acts of war as “terrorism,” precisely to erase the line between attacking an army and attacking a people. The line is real, and it is worth stating plainly what falls on the lawful side of it.
Killing a commander is an act of war. When General Igor Kirillov — head of Russia’s chemical-defense forces, who had ordered the use of banned chemical weapons and pushed the lie about American biolabs in Ukraine — was killed in Moscow in December 2024, that was a lawful strike on the enemy’s military capacity in its most concentrated form. A war criminal and combatant is a legitimate target at his desk and at his door, not only at the front.
Striking the war economy is an act of war. The March strikes on Russia’s export terminals at Ust-Luga and Primorsk paralyzed roughly forty percent of the country’s oil-export capacity; a Ukrainian drone hit a St. Petersburg oil terminal on the opening day of Russia’s flagship economic forum. Gas pipelines, depots, terminals — these are legitimate targets, because the war runs on the money they generate. Every ruble denied is a missile not fired at a Ukrainian city. To call this “terrorism” is to demand that the defender fight an army while leaving untouched the economy that arms it — which is to demand that the defender lose. The brand is applied for exactly that reason: to relabel a strike on the means of war as a strike on a people, and so to smuggle the aggressor’s own method onto the defender’s account.
Genocide is intent, and the false-symmetry trap
This brings us to the most abused word in the vocabulary of war. Genocide is not a body count. It is the aim of destroying a group as such — the purpose, not the number, is what the word names. A smaller toll can be genocide if the intent is to erase a people; a larger toll need not be, if the intent was to defeat an army. So the comparison that asks only “who killed more” is asking the wrong question, and the right one — what was being attempted — returns two different answers here. Russia’s aim is the destruction of the Ukrainian nation as such: the de-Ukrainization, the children deported to be remade, the grid struck to freeze a population. Ukraine’s aim is to defeat an army and drain the economy that feeds it. “Both sides kill” therefore settles nothing, because the word that matters describes not the killing but its purpose.
This is exactly why the aggressor reaches for false symmetry, and even for invented atrocity tales — the lurid, manufactured horrors floated to muddy the ledger so that the real and the fictional blur and the audience throws up its hands. The point of these fabrications is not to be believed in detail. It is to drag the defender down to the aggressor’s level, to convert a clean record into a contested one by sheer volume of allegation. Refusing the equivalence is not partisanship. It is accuracy — the simple insistence that a thing alleged is not a thing done, and that a defense is not a genocide because it killed.
And so the maturity that says “both sides do terrible things” is exposed for what it is: not wisdom but the decision, taken under cover of detachment, to stop looking one sentence too early — before the sentence that distinguishes the one who set the fire from the ones trying not to burn. There are two wars on that map, not one. Only one of them is being waged against civilians. The just defender wins the moral argument by the single means that has ever been available to it — by being, in fact, the one that did not make war on a people — and it keeps the rules not because it is weak, but because keeping them is the very thing it is fighting to preserve.