What happens to a person when war threatens not only the body, but also their sense of who they are?
In this conversation, I speak with Ukrainian psychiatrist and former serviceman Vladyslav Synyahovskyy about his article moral injury, combat stress, identity, leadership, and the difficult transition between being a warrior and being a citizen. Drawing on his experience serving in the Ukrainian Armed Forces and working with soldiers and veterans, Vladyslav Synyahovskyy describes why the psychological consequences of war cannot always be understood through trauma and PTSD alone. As he puts it: “It’s not only stress reaction of body, but you are living in such condition, in such surrounding, when you are thinking how to live at all. And this is very moral aspect of life.”
We explore his work on moral injury among Ukrainian soldiers and the real-life cases that led him and his colleagues to examine what happens when war collides with a person’s values, autonomy and identity. Vladyslav Synyahovskyy captures the central problem in one striking sentence: “Moral injury reflects the ethical violence of modern war — not just the destruction of bodies but damage to belief systems and identities.” What does that mean in practice, and how is moral injury different from PTSD?
A recurring theme is identity. What happens when an IT specialist, father or ordinary citizen suddenly has to become a soldier? What has to change in order to survive? And what happens when that same person eventually has to return home? Vladyslav Synyahovskyy describes the distance between these worlds: “Here when you are warrior you can do everything to survive and you are so effective as so many enemies you will kill. But in normal civil life you need to be polite. You need to be open, kind and yeah. So just imagine how it’s possible to jump to unite in one person such different identity.”
We also discuss how modern warfare is changing the psychological and moral landscape of combat. Drones create a constant threat, but they can also confront soldiers with situations in which they can see wounded or dead comrades while being unable to reach them. This raises difficult questions about helplessness, responsibility, survivor guilt and leadership. In Vladyslav Synyahovskyy words: “I survived and my friends were killed.”
Leadership therefore becomes another central part of the conversation. Why can two units exposed to similar circumstances respond very differently? What does good leadership look like under extreme conditions? And can leadership protect people not only physically and psychologically, but morally?
From there, we move to what happens after combat. Vladyslav Synyahovskyy has conducted hundreds of combat psychological group debriefings and explains why talking with comrades can matter after extreme experiences. His message is deceptively simple: “If you want to survive, you need to talk with your comrades, your friends.” We discuss what soldiers need from such conversations, the role of shared emotion, and why Vladyslav Synyahovskyy sometimes approaches returning soldiers not simply as people who need help, but as people with valuable knowledge: “You are experts. You are survivors.”
We also explore military ethics. Can ethics education prepare soldiers for the moral reality of war? What happens when the values someone takes into war collide with what they encounter there? And what might military ethics contribute when soldiers have to make decisions under conditions that are radically different from the classroom?
The conversation also touches on the iCOVER protocol and acute combat stress. Vladyslav Synyahovskyy has experience teaching soldiers how to respond to acute stress reactions and sees value in grounding someone back in reality. But he also raises an important practical question: what happens when the person who is supposed to help a stressed teammate is simultaneously fighting for his own survival?
Ultimately, the conversation comes back to perhaps the hardest transition of all: coming home. How do you move from a world in which survival, threat and the enemy are clear to the ambiguity of ordinary civilian life? What does someone have to unlearn? And how do you rebuild meaning, relationships and a moral compass after war has changed the way you see yourself and the world?
Vladyslav Synyahovskyy summarizes that challenge in a sentence that runs through the entire conversation:
“People need to return from animalistic behavior and learn how to survive a normal life.”
And perhaps that is the deeper question behind this episode: How do we prepare people to survive war without losing their ability to live in peace?