May 29, 2025

Demian Shevko

Defence Correspondent at The New Voice of Ukraine

Investigative journalist and editor covering Russia’s war against Ukraine. As a former news producer and fixer for The Independent, Demian has worked with international media to expose war crimes and Russian disinformation. His work focuses on deconstructing Russian imperial narratives and tracking Kremlin influence

Russian soldiers, who were involved in the country’s military campaign in Ukraine, march in columns during a parade on Victory Day in central Moscow, Russia, May 9, 2025. (Photo: REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov)

Russia’s war against Ukraine has been explained through geopolitical, economic, and ideological lenses. All of them matter. None, however, truly reflects the savage nature of how it’s taking place. Why do Russian soldiers rape, torture civilians, and shoot Ukraianin POWs in the back? Why does a pilot drop bombs on residential buildings, sleep, and do it again tomorrow? Why does a whole nation completely switch off its empathy?

There is, though, another — deeper and more primal — way to understand it: through the biology of the human brain. The horror unfolding in Ukraine reflects not only imperial ambition but the failure of self-regulation on a national scale, as seen through the lens of behavioral neuroscience.

In a 2010 course at Stanford University on aggression, empathy, and moral reasoning, Robert Sapolsky  explored how two major brain systems — the limbic system, including the amygdala, and the frontal cortex — interact to govern human behavior. The amygdala drives instinctual responses like fear, territoriality, and aggression. It’s fast, primitive, automatic. It doesn’t think. It reacts. It was designed to help animals survive — to flinch at shadows, to strike before bitten. The frontal cortex, by contrast, is responsible for restraint, planning, empathy, and moral judgment — what makes us truly human. That’s the part that says: wait. That’s the part that says: don’t. It helps us plan, reflect, empathize. It inhibits. 

Russia’s war of aggression offers a terrifying glimpse into what happens when the amygdala takes control and the frontal cortex is collectively silenced. In wartime Russia, this fear-driven part of the brain dominates—fueled by relentless propaganda, enforced isolation, and a manufactured sense of existential threat.

The amygdala is not only a threat detector — it is also deeply involved in social categorization, rapidly assessing who belongs to the group and who does not. Evolutionarily, this helped our ancestors distinguish allies from enemies. But in the modern world, this system is easily hijacked.

The Russian propaganda machine has done exactly that. Ukrainians — long portrayed as brothers — have been reframed as traitors, fascists, NATO puppets. This identity shift triggers primal aggression. The amygdala fires. Empathy shuts down. Frontal cortex reasoning — the kind that could evaluate historical ties, economic logic, or human cost — is overridden by tribal reflexes.

In this light, the invasion becomes not just a political act but a biological event: the mass activation of a neural system evolved for war — now misused by a regime that preys on ancient circuits. Russia has constructed a state that disables moral regulation. It drowns empathy. Rewards dehumanization. Punishes thought. What remains is a nation that acts not out of reason, but reflex.

The man at the center of this aggression, Putin understands this better than his critics. He governs the way a diseased brain misfires: paranoid, reactive, impulsive. He sees enemies in shadows, insults in silence. His decisions are no longer strategic — they’re compulsive. He has become a limbic system in a suit.

And like a damaged brain, the system around him starts to imitate.

This isn’t anyway a justification. It’s a map of how moral collapse occurs — not in theory, but in flesh. In that context, Russia is not just being led politically — it is being driven by a brain without brakes.

Soldiers, officers, and pilots carrying out atrocities in Ukraine may understand on some level that what they are doing is evil. But when moral responsibility is outsourced — “I was following orders” — the frontal cortex goes offline. The moral impulse is overridden by hierarchy and fear.

But if neuroscience helps explain how atrocity unfolds, it also hints at how it can be stopped.

The Russian people are not biologically different from anyone else. They possess the same cognitive capacity for restraint, empathy, and reasoning. The neural pathways that enable obedience can just as easily support resistance. The empathy that has been dulled isn’t lost—it can be reawakened. But that transformation demands friction: brave voices, uncomfortable truths, and the contagious power of defiance. 

That’s why defeating Russia on the battlefield, while necessary, is not sufficient to ensure long-term peace, security, or transformation. What’s needed is a far more comprehensive strategy—one that combines hard power with an equally ambitious deployment of soft power to dismantle the underlying structures that perpetuate authoritarianism, imperialism, and violence within the Russian system. Military victory must be accompanied by deliberate efforts to disrupt and reshape the very structural logic of Russian governance and identity. This includes supporting, strengthening, and giving legitimacy to the various anti-Kremlin groups already fighting alongside the Ukrainian military—Chechen, Tatar, and Russian volunteer formations whose struggle is not only military but also symbolic, challenging the myth of Russian unity and infallibility from within. Beyond the battlefield, it means investing in political, technological, and informational support for exile communities and opposition groups operating from abroad. It means building networks of internal resistance inside Russia, using encrypted communication, AI, and other emerging technologies to help dissidents organize, document atrocities, and sabotage state propaganda. And where necessary, it requires targeted, disruptive actions—even if forceful—that break the inertia of Russia’s authoritarian structurality. This multifaceted approach must be strategic, long-term, and deeply coordinated, aimed not just at weakening the regime but at fostering the conditions for a new Russian political culture to emerge—one rooted in decentralization, accountability, and the rejection of imperial mythologies.

Ukraine is fighting not only against bombs and missiles. It is resisting a civilizational regression — a neurological unraveling of the very mechanisms that keep humanity from savagery. The frontal cortex is what makes humans capable of restraint and compassion. Its suppression — whether by trauma, ideology, or willful ignorance — is what makes them capable of crimes against humanity.

The war in Ukraine is not just a geopolitical crisis. It is a failure of inhibition — one that science helps us see, and moral courage must help us stop.