Greek Tragedy Has Never Been the Story of Good Triumphing Over Evil
Greek tragedy has never been the story of good triumphing over evil, much less the narrative of tidy victories and happy endings. In the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the forces of fear, pride, and moral necessity sweep up even the noblest figures and grind them into ruin. Heroes do not fall because they are evil, but because they are all too human: fallible, ambitious, flawed, and eventually undone by the fatal circumstance. That tragic form maps all too well onto the world of international politics. States are not gods and cannot shape the world at will. Like Oedipus or Agamemnon, they are instead compelled by circumstance, undone by their own hamartia, their fatal flaws. War is the purest expression of tragedy. And nowhere is this more obvious than in the war between Russia and Ukraine.
The cycle begins with hubris, the reckless, overreaching pride that leads tragic actors to test their limits. Russia, unwilling to accept the post-Cold War world order or its status within it, convinced itself that a blitzkrieg invasion could reassert its great-power status and force Ukraine into submission. Ukraine, determined to win the sovereignty it had sought and break Moscow’s gravitational pull, pressed ahead with its bids to join NATO and the European Union even as it had to know that such moves could trigger Russian wrath. The United States and Europe, equally convinced that the post-Cold War system worked for them and so confident in their own virtue, dismissed Moscow’s warnings and pushed their own security priorities nonetheless. Each, like a tragic hero, overinvested in its own story and refused to compromise. That was the fatal hamartia at the center of this war, writ large and at all levels of the conflict: the inability of any actor to back down from a position that it defined as vital to its honor, security, or survival.
Peripeteia, or reversal of fortune, inevitably follows. Russia’s lightning war turned into a quagmire that has laid bare the weakness of its armed forces and left it vulnerable to a new dependency on China. Ukraine, energized by Western arms and political defiance, has been able to bloody the bear but at enormous cost: ruined cities and towns, a shattered economy and millions of refugees, loss of territory, and millions of internally displaced persons. Even the West has experienced its peripeteia, the reversal from seeming invincibility to the gnawing doubts of whether it will have the staying power to see the war through. All these actors have experienced the reversal of fortunes that the Greeks recognized as built into human life: the fall that inevitably comes from overconfidence crashing into reality.
The fall then leads to anagnorisis, the painful recognition of the truth. Russia has had to recognize that victory in Ukraine will not re-create the Russian empire it imagines. Ukraine has had to recognize that its heroic resistance, while necessary for survival, will not by itself produce full sovereignty. The United States and Europe have had to recognize that their own resources and unity are not inexhaustible and that even among the strongest of allies, they cannot fully master the tragic dynamics of war. This recognition of limits does not set the actors free. It only deepens the tragedy, leaving them to endure the weight of the choices they could not avoid making.
As of late August 2025, the war is already locked in these tragic rhythms. Ukraine’s much-heralded 2023 summer counteroffensive proved an abject failure. It achieved none of its aims, breaking through nowhere, leaving Russian lines intact, and exhausting precious reserves of men and matériel. Ditto its Kursk offensive launched a little over a year ago. Russia’s own multi-pronged offensives fared little better, yielding only limited gains in Donbas while its positions in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia remain steady but fragile. The front has congealed into a grinding, attritional stalemate, a battlefield of sacrifice without reward, where blood is spilled but nothing of consequence changes. Western aid continues, but under the shadow of political exhaustion. Europe is rearming, but at too slow a pace to alter the military balance. Trump’s Washington is still with Kyiv, but only on narrower terms. The war has become a tragic drama with no catharsis, only prolongation, futility, and loss.
Greek tragedy shows us that there is no such thing as pure justice in human affairs. Antigone’s piety ends in death. Orestes’ vengeance leaves him haunted. Ajax’s pride drives him to ruin. The noblest cause cannot ward off tragedy. And this is especially true in war — and nowhere more obviously than in the case of the war in Ukraine. Kyiv’s resistance is noble, but every act of defiance extracts a price that no victory can erase. Russia has been exposed as weaker than it claimed, yet it endures, absorbing blow after blow without collapse. The West, meanwhile, is ensnared in its own tragic arc: its hubris in believing it could both arm Ukraine and contain the war now collides with the fatal reality that every choice carries ruin. To do less is to abandon Ukraine; to do more is to risk a wider war; to walk the middle path is to feed the fire without end. Its very effort to manage the conflict has become part of the tragedy, prolonging the war while corroding its own strength. No one will emerge unsullied. The scars will outlast the war, for in tragedy there are no victors—only survivors.
The plays of Athens often ended with frozen conflict rather than resolution. The gods would step in, or some new institution would be invented to keep the cycle of vengeance from consuming the city. That is the best that can be hoped for in Ukraine today. Russia’s conquest and Ukraine’s total victory are both off the table for now. What remains possible, if anything, is some kind of settlement or frozen conflict that contains the fighting without resolving the underlying clash of interests. It will not be justice. It will not be peace. It will be the kind of tragic accommodation that international politics—and especially war—so often delivers.
That is the enduring lesson of the Greeks. War is tragedy because it arises from the collision of pride, fear, and necessity; because it transforms virtue into suffering; because it produces reversals and recognitions that leave no side unscathed; and because it ends not with victory but with some fragile order that allows life to go on. To see the war in Ukraine as a morality play of villains and innocents is to misunderstand its deeper truth. It is, like all wars, a tragedy: unavoidable, ruinous, and enduring.
We do not live in a world of comedies, of harmony and justice. We live in a world of tragedies, of noblest efforts laced with the seeds of their own ruin, of survival itself the closest thing to a happy ending. The Greeks understood that two and a half millennia ago. The war in Ukraine reminds us of it now.
Andrew Latham, Ph.D., a tenured professor at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He is also a Senior Washington Fellow with the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy in Ottawa and a non-resident fellow with Defense Priorities, a think tank in Washington, D.C.