Conflict in Ukraine: lessons from Tolstoy’s War and Peace

By Matthew Parish, Associate Editor

Friday 24 April 2026

There is a temptation in moments of crisis to reach for the language of strategy and to imagine that war is directed from above — by generals, presidents, and their plans — as though history were a chessboard and the pieces obedient. It is precisely this temptation that Leo Tolstoy dismantled in his monumental novel War and Peace. Written in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, the work is not merely a narrative of aristocratic life but a sustained philosophical argument about the nature of power, causation and the illusion of control in wartime. Applied to the contemporary Russian invasion of Ukraine, Tolstoy’s insights do not simply illuminate events — they unsettle many of the assumptions upon which modern military and political analysis still rests.

Tolstoy’s central contention is that history is not made by great men, however much societies prefer to attribute events to singular figures. Napoleon, in his telling, is not the master of Europe but rather a man carried along by currents he neither understands nor controls. Orders are issued, but they are misunderstood, ignored, delayed or rendered irrelevant by circumstances. The decisive factors of war lie elsewhere — in the cumulative, unrecorded actions of countless individuals, in morale, in chance, and in the subtle interplay between environment and human will.

If one applies this framework to the invasion launched by the Russian Federation in February 2022, the immediate comparison is unavoidable. The war was widely interpreted, especially in its early phases, as the product of a single will — that of Vladimir Putin — acting upon a coherent strategic design. Western commentary frequently sought to divine his intentions, to model his rationality, and to explain the course of the war as a sequence of decisions emanating from the Kremlin. Yet the early failures of the Russian campaign — the stalled advance on Kyiv, the logistical disarray, the collapse of morale among poorly prepared units — suggested something closer to Tolstoy’s conception of war as a system resistant to central control.

Orders to advance did not translate into coordinated movement. Units became lost or immobilised — not because of a single failure, but because of innumerable small ones: inadequate maps, broken communications, local resistance, unexpected terrain conditions, and the independent decisions of officers on the ground. Tolstoy would have recognised this pattern immediately. In War and Peace, the chaos of battle arises not from incompetence alone but from the sheer impossibility of aligning thousands of human actions into a single coherent design. The Russian army in Ukraine — despite its formal hierarchy — has repeatedly demonstrated this same fragmentation.

Against this Tolstoy places enormous weight upon what he calls the “spirit of the army”, an intangible but decisive force. In 1812 it is the resilience of the Russian Empire’s soldiers and civilians, rather than the genius of commanders, that ultimately defeats Napoleon’s invasion. Morale, endurance and a willingness to suffer are shown to outweigh numerical strength or technical superiority.

Here the parallel with Ukraine is striking. The Ukrainian Armed Forces — alongside volunteer formations and civilian resistance — have exhibited precisely the kind of collective will that Tolstoy describes. The defence of cities such as Mariupol, Bakhmut and Avdiivka has often been conducted under conditions that would, in purely strategic terms, appear untenable. Yet the persistence of Ukrainian resistance has altered the course of the war in ways that no initial calculation could have predicted.

Tolstoy would insist that this is not accidental. The “spirit” of a nation at war is not an epiphenomenon but a central determinant of outcomes. It cannot be manufactured by decree, nor easily measured by analysts. It emerges from a society’s sense of purpose, its perception of justice and its collective memory. Ukraine’s war is widely understood within the country as existential — a defence not merely of territory but of identity and political independence. Russia’s war by contrast has often appeared to its own participants as ambiguous or imposed — a “special military operation” whose aims have shifted and whose costs have become increasingly difficult to justify.

This divergence in moral clarity has had material consequences. Units that believe in their cause fight differently from those that do not — not simply with greater courage, but with greater initiative. Tolstoy repeatedly emphasises that the most effective actions in war are often those not explicitly ordered. In Ukraine, small-unit autonomy, improvisation, and the integration of civilian technological expertise — particularly in the use of unmanned aerial systems — have produced effects disproportionate to the resources employed. These are not the outcomes of central planning alone but of distributed agency across a society mobilised for defence.

Another of Tolstoy’s enduring lessons concerns the illusion of inevitability. After events have occurred, historians construct narratives that render them logical and predetermined. Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, in retrospect, appears as a sequence of errors leading inexorably to catastrophe. Yet Tolstoy argues that at each moment, multiple possibilities existed — and that the eventual outcome was contingent upon innumerable factors beyond any individual’s control.

The same caution applies to the interpretation of the war in Ukraine. Early predictions of a rapid Russian victory now seem misplaced, just as later assumptions of imminent Ukrainian breakthroughs have often proved overly optimistic. The war has unfolded not as a linear progression but as a series of oscillations — advances and retreats shaped by logistics, weather, international support, and the evolving adaptation of both sides. Tolstoy would warn against the human tendency to impose retrospective coherence upon such complexity.

He would also challenge the modern fixation upon technological determinism. In contemporary discourse there is a tendency to attribute battlefield outcomes to particular systems — precision weapons, drones, electronic warfare capabilities — as though these were decisive in themselves. Tolstoy’s perspective does not deny the importance of material factors but situates them within a broader human context. Weapons are only as effective as the people who use them, the structures that sustain them, and the morale that drives their deployment.

The proliferation of unmanned systems in Ukraine illustrates this interplay. Drones have indeed transformed aspects of the battlefield — enhancing reconnaissance, enabling precision strikes, and altering the balance between offence and defence. Yet their effectiveness has depended upon organisational flexibility, rapid learning, and a culture of innovation. These are social and institutional qualities, not merely technical ones. Tolstoy would recognise in this the same principle he observed in 1812 — that the outcome of war is determined not by isolated factors but by the interaction of many.

Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of Tolstoy’s philosophy is his scepticism towards the concept of control itself. Leaders, he suggests, act under the illusion that they direct events, when in reality they respond to pressures that constrain their choices. Their decisions are shaped by information that is incomplete or distorted, by institutional dynamics, and by the unpredictable reactions of others.

In the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine this perspective complicates the portrayal of the war as the execution of a master plan. It invites consideration of the internal dynamics of the Russian state — the role of bureaucratic incentives, the fear of dissent, the distortion of intelligence — in shaping decisions that may appear, from the outside, as deliberate strategy. It also applies to Ukraine and her allies, whose policies have evolved in response to changing circumstances rather than following a fixed blueprint.

What then does Tolstoy ultimately offer to the understanding of this war? Not a predictive model, nor a set of strategic prescriptions, but a form of intellectual humility. He reminds us that war is not a problem to be solved by theory alone. It is a human phenomenon — chaotic, contingent, and resistant to simplification.

For contemporary observers, particularly those engaged in policy and analysis, this lesson is both uncomfortable and necessary. It challenges the desire for certainty and the confidence placed in models that purport to forecast outcomes. It suggests that the most important variables — morale, perception, collective will — are also the least quantifiable.

Yet there is also in Tolstoy’s vision a form of hope. If history is not the product of a single will, then it is not entirely subject to it. The actions of individuals and communities — often small, often unrecorded — accumulate into forces capable of shaping events. In Ukraine this is visible in the resilience of civilian society, in the adaptability of her armed forces, and in the international networks that have sustained her defence.

Tolstoy would likely resist drawing direct analogies between 1812 and the present day — he was deeply sceptical of historical parallels — but he would recognise the underlying patterns. An invading power encounters not merely an army but a society; plans dissolve into complexity; outcomes emerge from the interplay of countless decisions. Above all he would remind us that the course of the war remains open — not because it is unknowable, but because it is being made, moment by moment, by those who live it.

War and Peace remains not a relic of a past conflict but a guide to the enduring nature of war itself — and a warning against the comforting but misleading belief that it can ever be fully understood.