Preserving Tenderness Amid War's Trauma: Resisting the Armor of Survival
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/profile/alina-sarnatska. "Russia is raining death on Ukraine’s women and children. Our hands shake, but we keep going for love | Alina Sarnatska | The Guardian." September 9, 2026. www.theguardian.com
The Gist
The author describes how years of Russian attacks have forced Ukrainian women to numb themselves emotionally just to survive and keep caring for their families, much like her grandmother was hardened by WWII. But she pushes back against this, insisting that she wants to keep her tenderness and ability to love and be vulnerable, even if that makes her seem less 'tough' or prepared for hardship.
Conclusion
Even though the trauma of Russia's ongoing war on Ukraine has forced people (especially women) to emotionally harden themselves to survive and keep functioning, the author argues we should resist letting this survival-driven hardening fully strip away our capacity for tenderness, compassion, and self-kindness.
Premises
- Russia has subjected Ukraine to nearly five years of relentless attacks—missiles, drones, nuclear threats, sieges, and infrastructure destruction—that specifically endanger women and children.
- This sustained trauma produces visible physical and psychological symptoms (e.g., shaking hands) in ordinary people, including the author and her friends.
- Ukrainian women cope by suppressing emotion and outward distress ('everything's fine') in order to continue caring for children and working, even while sleeping in shelters and corridors.
- The author's grandmother, a WWII survivor, exemplifies how enduring extreme violence can permanently harden a person, making her incapable of compassion—even toward herself or her own granddaughter.
- This hardening, while functionally necessary for survival, comes at a real emotional cost: loss of softness, spontaneous affection, and self-compassion.
- When resilience becomes an unquestioned obligation, normal emotional responses to trauma (like trembling hands) get reinterpreted as personal weakness or failure, compounding suffering.
- The contrast between wartime reality and social media's 'cult of self' rhetoric (success, choosing yourself) further alienates those enduring war trauma.
Assumptions
- Emotional hardening and compassion/tenderness are in tension—implying one must be sacrificed to sustain the other under extreme stress.
- The grandmother's WWII experience is a valid and generalizable analogy for how prolonged war trauma shapes emotional character across generations.
- Maintaining tenderness is a choice available to individuals even amid ongoing existential threat, rather than something entirely determined by circumstance.
- Society (or war itself) implicitly demands stoic resilience as an obligation, and this demand is harmful if unexamined.
- The reader will accept personal testimony and anecdote as sufficient evidence for broader claims about the psychological effects of war.