At the beginning of the full-scale war, Ukraine lived in a rare moment of moral clarity. The threat was so open, so immediate, that many men did not wait to be summoned. They went forward voluntarily, driven by the belief that private choice and public duty had, for a brief and terrible moment, become the same thing. Sacrifice still felt collective then. It did not yet seem assigned.
In those first months, solidarity rested on more than patriotism or shock. It rested on a deeper intuition: the burden was being shared honestly, history was not hiding some behind the backs of others, and if a high price had to be paid, it would at least not be distributed through humiliation. Human beings can endure almost anything more easily than they can endure visible unfairness.
That is why the later shift in public feeling proved so painful. It did not arrive all at once, and it did not come from a single cause. It came gradually, as the war ceased to feel like an emergency sprint and began to feel like a long condition without a clear horizon. With that shift, the psychology of sacrifice changed as well. What people can bear for a season, they do not bear in the same way when the season disappears.
As Daycom’s earlier analysis suggests, this is the point at which the modern shadow of a witch hunt begins to emerge. Not when a country asks much of its citizens, but when that demand ceases to feel common and begins to feel selectively distributed. The man in the city no longer experiences himself as part of a shared national effort. He begins to experience himself as the bearer of an obligation already laid upon him in advance.
In a healthy society, duty may be hard, but it must not feel degradingly unequal. The moment people begin to suspect that some have routes of escape through money, status, connections, family insulation, or the simple privilege of being protected by invisible arrangements, while others face only direct exposure, the language of duty starts to lose its moral balance. It remains law. It no longer remains justice.
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This is why corruption matters here in a deeper way than public discourse usually admits. Its true damage lies not only in broken procedures or stolen opportunities. It lies in what it does to the moral symmetry of sacrifice. A man will risk much if he believes the risk carries shared meaning. But he begins to recoil inwardly when he senses he is being asked not simply to sacrifice, but to sacrifice in someone else’s place.
That recoil is often misread as cowardice. In fact, it is more often a crisis of trust. The problem is not that people suddenly stopped understanding danger. They understand it perfectly well. The problem is that in a long war, the rhetoric of duty cannot sustain itself if it is accompanied by the experience of unequal exposure. When all are declared equal in principle, but only some feel permanently vulnerable in practice, solidarity starts to lose its nerve.
This is where the psychology of the witch hunt enters. It begins not with punishment, but with a change in how a person is seen. A man of a certain age ceases to appear first as a person—with his work, his family, his fatigue, his dignity, his private thresholds of pain—and begins to appear as a category that must be accounted for, intercepted, processed, accelerated. The human biography fades; the social function takes its place.
That shift is always seductive for a tired society. It simplifies the moral picture. Instead of asking the harder question—why does the common burden no longer feel common?—society asks the easier and harsher one: who has not yet been reached? That is the true entrance of witch-hunt logic into public life. Collective powerlessness hardens into suspicion, and suspicion becomes a form of socially approved roughness.
At that point, the atmosphere of everyday life begins to change. A man no longer enters the city as a neutral civic space. He enters it as a space of possible interruption. He starts counting not only hours and errands, but routes, crossings, courtyards, stations, pauses, corners—those places where it is better not to linger, not to draw attention, not to let ordinary visibility become vulnerability. Public space acquires a second meaning.
From this grows a distinct form of humiliation. A person has said nothing, done nothing, been proven guilty of nothing, and yet he already lives as if his very presence requires explanation. This is the psychological core of every witch hunt: not punishment after wrongdoing is established, but pressure toward self-justification before any real conversation has begun. Suspicion moves ahead of the person.
The most important mistake here is to reduce this process to a simple question of courage. What is collapsing is often not courage, but trust. At the start of the war, men came forward not because they did not fear death, but because they believed in the honesty of a shared stance. They believed the burden belonged to everyone. Once that meaning becomes entangled with selective unfairness, fear stops being only fear of death. It becomes fear of being used without truth.
That is the thought many societies try not to say aloud. A person does not want to die “for someone else” not in a selfish sense, but in a moral one. He does not want his own limit of pain to become compensation for someone else’s protection, someone else’s access, someone else’s immunity, someone else’s ability to wait behind the scenes while others are made visible to risk. This is not merely instinct. It is a demand for moral reciprocity.
And that is why the contemporary shadow of a witch hunt in Ukraine does not arise from one decree or one episode of harshness. It grows out of the slow corrosion of a social contract. First disappears the feeling of temporariness. Then the feeling that sacrifice is evenly shared. Then trust in the fairness of procedure. After that, the man in public space is no longer experienced as a participant in a common story. He increasingly becomes its raw material.
This is the true point of fracture. A witch hunt always begins where a living person is replaced by a function. Where a weary society agrees, often without fully admitting it, to stop seeing a citizen and to start seeing a sign. Not a face, but a category. Not a life, but an answer to someone else’s shortage. Once that substitution takes place, injustice has already sunk deeper than any single incident.
What makes this process especially dangerous is that it nearly always disguises itself as necessity. That is why it is so difficult to confront in time. Society tells itself that this is only temporary severity, an unfortunate but required deviation, a rough measure demanded by history. Yet the human psyche recognizes something earlier than official formulas do. It knows when order has stopped protecting and started searching.
And once that happens, more changes than a person’s relationship to the street. His relationship to the common future changes as well. Wherever a man no longer feels himself to be the bearer of rights, he slowly ceases to feel himself a full bearer of shared meaning. A quiet rupture opens between society and those whom it still calls its own while teaching them to live as though they were conditionally included.
This is why the way out of such a psychological crisis cannot be found in more hardness, more public shaming, or harsher moral pressure. It can only be found in restoring fairness as a lived public feeling. People can endure a heavy duty far longer than they can endure degrading inequality. But the moment inequality becomes more visible than meaning, solidarity contracts and suspicion begins to look natural.
And that is how a modern witch-hunt logic takes root—not through mysticism, and not through literal repetition of old historical scenes, but through the gradual destruction of confidence in the honesty of a shared burden. If that process is not named in time, a great collective struggle can begin to generate its own small internal Salem: without the bonfires, without the old language, but with the same structure of preassigned guilt and selective vulnerability.
