Peter Olsthoorn

_A few public actions prepared the way for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the purpose of which was to define a special military operation as forced, necessary and inevitable. The use of armed force against Ukraine was discussed during those public events. The Russian authorities applied many arguments, and a great deal of attention was paid to the moral justification of war. In this article, I consistently analyze three problems: why did Russian officials use moral language to justify the war, what arguments did they use, and would these arguments retain their effect in the long term. I will examine several addresses made by the President of Russia and the Russian Federation Security Council meeting materials to address these questions. I conclude that Putin's lack of legitimacy forced him to justify the war in moral terms, and the peculiarities of Russian moral discourse allowed him to do that. However, even if this strategy was effective to a certain extent at the beginning of the war, it can hardly be stable and sustainable._ _Keywords_: invasion of Ukraine, Russia, Ukraine, just war, morality.

As part of the roundtable, “Moral Injury, Trauma, and War,” this essay explores the relationship between revisionist just war theory and moral injury. It proceeds in four sections. First, it offers a brief overview of the just war tradition, focusing on traditionalist and revisionist accounts, respectively. Next, it explores the relationship between moral injury and armed conflict. Then, it explores the links between moral injury and revisionist accounts of just war theory. Finally, by way of conclusion, the essay signals two potential complementary paths forward that future research could use to clarify the revisionist position and its link with moral injury.

Most books and articles still treat leadership and ethics as related though separate phenomena. This edited volume is an exception to that rule, and explicitly treats leadership and ethics as a single domain. Clearly, ethics is an aspect of leadership, and not a distinct approach that exists alongside other approaches to leadership. This holds especially true for the for the military, as it is one of the few organizations that can legitimately use violence. Military leaders have to deal with personnel who have either used or experienced violence. This intertwinement of leadership and violence separates military leadership from leadership in other professions. Even in a time that leadership is increasingly questioned, it is still good leadership that keeps soldiers from crossing the thin line between legitimate force and excessive violence.