My parents suffered through the war, unable to evacuate, moving back and forth across the eastern front throughout the Korean War. My mother endured a massacre, but my father suffered trauma from having been nearly killed as a soldier (and thus survived) or having personally experienced killing the enemy. Once, while my father was driving a truck loaded with bodies during his time as a non-commissioned officer in the South Korean army, a North Korean soldier jumped into the driver's seat and attacked him with a broadsword. Without even having time to grab the rifle he had set aside, the People's Army fell out of the vehicle in the ensuing struggle, suffering a crushing head on a wheel. At the time, my father was at war, and if it had been peacetime, it would have been a case of self-defense, but after overcoming the attack through physical contact, he often told me about it when he was drunk. He said that it was not my father who killed the North Korean soldiers, but the soldiers themselves who died. My father, who had a very moderate personality, was tormented by that scene until the very end.
I think the war in Ukraine, which has dragged on for four and a half years, has deepened the war trauma among the Ukrainian people and young Russians. Russia must hold end-of-war talks quickly, taking the harm to its own people into account. Although Ukraine and Russia have conflicting attitudes toward South Korea, South Korea should consider carefully Ukraine's desperate situation for overcoming its difficulties and Russia's friendly stance toward Korea from a postwar economic and strategic perspective.
The Country Where Time Cannot Heal
Ukraine's War Trauma and the Lesson Korea Must Remember
Lee Hyeong-chun · Independent Columnist · October 2026
Introduction
Four years and eight months have passed since Russia launched its full-scale invasion. Washington is trying to revive trilateral talks this October, yet Moscow still demands eastern territory its army has not even captured. International forecasters put the odds of a ceasefire before the end of this year at around 15 percent. The war has not ended, and in the meantime deep wounds have already been carved into the minds of Ukrainians.
A nationally representative survey released in September found that 31.2 percent of Ukrainian respondents met the criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or complex PTSD. A smaller study found probable PTSD at 31 percent, yet only 15 percent of participants had sought psychological help. One in three carries the wound; most carry it alone.
This column asks where that wound came from, why it will not heal easily, and what Korea must remember as it watches.
1. "An Avoidable War": Blaming the Victim Twice
It is often said that Ukraine fought a war it could have avoided: had it not insisted on NATO, had it respected Russia's security concerns, the tragedy would never have happened. I reject this argument without reservation. Telling a victim of violence "you brought this on yourself" is what trauma researchers call secondary victimization, and it makes recovery harder than the original injury. Placing a heavier burden on the weak is, in my view, one of humanity's oldest diseases.
The argument also fails on the facts. Under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine gave up the nuclear arsenal it inherited from the Soviet Union in return for assurances of its territorial integrity. In 2010 it adopted "non-bloc" status by law. It was precisely while Ukraine was legally non-aligned, in 2014, that Crimea was annexed. Neutrality did not protect it.
Some argue that Russia, lacking natural geographic fortifications, panicked at NATO's eastward expansion. Yet when Finland joined NATO in 2023 and greatly lengthened the alliance's border with Russia, Moscow's reaction was comparatively muted. Defensive fear alone cannot explain Russia's fixation on Ukraine. Russia is not a country that goes to war for such passive reasons.
2. Two Wounds Split from the Holodomor
Deep in Ukrainian memory lies the Holodomor, the famine of 1932-33. Under Stalin's forced collectivization and grain requisitions, an estimated 3.5 to 5 million people starved to death, and the entire countryside was crushed by hunger. In Soviet times this memory could not be spoken aloud; only after independence in 1991 was it restored to public remembrance. When Russia blockades grain exports and strikes Ukraine's farmland and ports, and Ukrainians speak of "a new Holodomor," I read it as an inherited, intergenerational wound being torn open again.
And what of the Russians? Where does the numbness of a society that barely flinches as its own soldiers are expended en masse and neighboring cities are turned to rubble come from? I see it not as an ethnic nature but as the product of accumulated state violence: serfdom until 1861, conscription that consumed people as raw material, Stalin's purges and the Gulag, and some 27 million Soviet dead in the Second World War. Centuries of a state treating human beings as expendable have anesthetized an entire society.
The Ukrainian memory of the Holodomor and Russian numbness are, in the end, two wounds that split from the same state violence. One became memory and resistance; the other, paralysis and compliance. Now the paralysis of one deepens the wound of the other. The accounts, from the war's early days, of Ukrainian children calling their parents in Russia from bomb shelters only to be told "that isn't happening" show this structure at its most painful.
3. Time Does Not Heal on Its Own
We like to say that time heals all wounds. Trauma research says otherwise. The psychiatrist Judith Herman identified the stages of recovery as, first, safety; second, remembrance and mourning; and finally, reconnection. As long as the threat continues, time does not close the wound. It hardens it.
Russia's invasion has fatally robbed Ukrainians of time as a remedy. It reopened the healing scar of the Holodomor, and it has permanently refused to acknowledge itself as the perpetrator. Russia does not recognize the Holodomor as genocide, and in his 2021 essay Vladimir Putin claimed that Russians and Ukrainians are "one people," denying Ukrainian nationhood itself.
In the history of reconciliation, what proved decisive was not time but the perpetrator's acknowledgment. Only after West German Chancellor Willy Brandt knelt before the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising memorial in 1970 did German-Polish reconciliation begin to move in earnest. Time becomes medicine only after acknowledgment. This war has destroyed Ukrainians' trust in Russia entirely, and that wound will last a very long time.
4. Recovery Without Acknowledgment: The West Must Embrace Ukraine
If acknowledgment from the perpetrator cannot be expected, what can Ukrainians recover through? I believe the condition is a firm embrace by the West. Ukraine fought on in the belief that it was not alone. The West therefore has a responsibility to answer that belief and to commit itself actively to Ukraine's postwar reconstruction.
Psychology has a concept called betrayal trauma: being abandoned by those one trusted and depended on wounds more deeply and for longer than harm done by an enemy. Ukraine has already watched the security assurances of the Budapest Memorandum come to nothing once. If, after a ceasefire, the West retreats citing "support fatigue," a wound of betrayal will be laid on top of the wound Russia left.
5. The Mirror Korea Holds Up
Korea is a country that can understand this wound better than most. But it must choose its comparisons carefully. Likening Russia and Ukraine to North and South Korea and speaking of "reunification" is dangerous, because it unwittingly adopts the Kremlin's frame that the two are one people. Ukraine is a distinct nation that won independence from an imperial center.
The Russia-Ukraine relationship more closely resembles that between Korea and Japan: a former ruler and the formerly ruled, where the wound keeps reopening even after eighty years so long as the victim feels the perpetrator has not sufficiently acknowledged it. Where Korea's experience of division fits precisely is inside Ukraine. The suspicion and resentment between those who survived occupation and those who did not, between those who left and those who stayed, between those who fought and those who did not, recall the reprisals and stigma that tore through Korean villages after the Korean War. And if this war halts as an armistice without resolving the territorial question, the tension of an "unfinished war" that the Korean peninsula has lived with for more than seventy years since 1953 will be reproduced in Ukraine.
6. The POW Dispute and Korea's Proper Stance
Seoul and Kyiv have recently fallen into a diplomatic dispute over North Korean prisoners of war. When President Zelensky disclosed at the UN General Assembly on September 23 that two captured North Korean soldiers had been transferred to South Korea, Seoul accused Kyiv of breaching a nondisclosure agreement and demanded an apology; Kyiv replied that no such agreement existed. Seoul announced the recall of its ambassador on October 8 and decided on October 20 to withdraw additional embassy staff.
Seoul's concern is not trivial. The safety of the prisoners' families still in North Korea is a matter of human life, not diplomatic face. Even so, I am concerned about a continued hard line. With Russia bound to North Korea by a mutual military assistance treaty, the sight of Seoul cornering Kyiv risks making Korea appear to stand on the side of the Russia-North Korea camp.
What Korea needs is neither cold detachment nor condescending pity, but a language of persuasion between equals: "We fully understand your situation; we ask you to understand ours, namely the safety of families left behind in the North." Ukraine is a suffering victim and, at the same time, a sovereign state making strategic judgments in its own interest. Treating it as an adult is the truest form of respect. Rather than clinging to a demand for an apology, shifting the agenda toward a joint framework for handling any future North Korean prisoners would let both countries save face.
Two levels must be kept distinct here. In moral judgment, the aggressor and the victim are clearly not the same. If Korea keeps a careful diplomatic distance and avoids becoming overly entangled with either side, it does so because of the peninsula's particular circumstances, not because both sides are equally right or equally wrong.
7. The Most Important Lesson: Weak Nations Become Prey
Russia designated South Korea an "unfriendly country" in 2022, yet it has never fully closed the door. That is calculation, not goodwill. Russia will need Korean capital and technology to rebuild its economy after the war, and so it carefully manages the Korea card, never letting the tension slacken. Korea must not mistake that calculated smile for friendship.
History bears witness. When Korea was weak at the end of the Joseon dynasty, Russia sought to treat the peninsula as its sphere of influence. After King Gojong took refuge in the Russian legation in 1896, Russia intervened deeply in the Joseon court, and its 1903 attempt to lease Yongampo became one of the sparks of the Russo-Japanese War.
But honesty requires saying more. Russia was not the only power that coveted the peninsula then. Qing China did too, as did Japan, and it was Japan that ultimately made Korea a colony. The lesson of Ukraine's tragedy for Korea is not that Russia is uniquely evil. It is that a weak nation can become the prey of great powers at any time, and that Russia is the country now carrying out that logic most blatantly.
The wounds Ukrainians must bear in the years ahead will be deep and long. What Korea should hold as it watches is not mere sympathy, but the memory that we ourselves once stood in that place, and the resolve never to stand there again.
References
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