Public correspondence
Letter to Zayka
There Are No Foreign Children — A Letter to Zayka on Just Defense.
My dearest Zayka,
I have been thinking about war—not merely as politics, strategy, territory, or victory, but as something that reaches into human beings themselves. I am writing this to you because I love you, because these questions concern the kind of world we leave to those we love, and because the present war with Iran has forced an ancient moral argument back into public view.
In February 2026, American and Israeli forces attacked Iran, and Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed. The conflict subsequently expanded into direct exchanges between Iran and the United States. [1] Pope Leo XIV has challenged the moral foundation of this war. Asked specifically whether Iran represented a “just war,” he answered that the traditional criteria were not present and argued that Just War theory arose in centuries incapable of imagining the destructive power humanity possesses today. [2]
That disagreement is where this letter begins.
The old doctrine: Just War
Christian thinkers did not originally construct Just War theory because they loved war. Augustine of Hippo, and later Thomas Aquinas, were trying to place moral restraints upon it.
In its developed form, the tradition asks difficult questions before violence can be morally justified:
Is there a just cause?
Is the authority ordering force legitimate?
Is the intention actually to restore justice and peace?
Have peaceful alternatives been seriously exhausted?
Is there a reasonable possibility of accomplishing the objective?
Is the force proportionate to the evil being prevented?
And will innocent people be protected?
These remain important questions.
But I believe the central question is now backwards.
Instead of asking:
“When are we justified in going to war?”
I would ask:
“What are we obligated to do to protect innocent human life—and what is the least destructive means capable of doing it?”
I call this Just Defense.
Just Defense
Just Defense begins with the innocent person rather than the sovereign state.
Its purpose is neither conquest nor vengeance, punishment, humiliation, resources, ideology, or national glory. Its legitimate purpose is the protection of human beings against aggression, invasion, genocide, enslavement, systematic sexual violence, and other grave assaults upon human dignity.
It therefore recognizes something that absolute pacifism struggles to answer: sometimes refusing to resist violence does not create peace. Sometimes it simply abandons the victim to the aggressor.
Ukraine demonstrates the problem terribly well.
United Nations investigators have documented rape and other sexual violence by Russian forces in occupied Ukrainian territory. They have documented victims ranging from children to elderly women, alongside torture, beatings, and killings. The UN Commission has continued documenting such crimes years into the invasion, including the rape of a thirteen-year-old girl and a woman who subsequently bore a child conceived through rape. [3][4]
This is why “peace” cannot simply mean the absence of gunfire. A woman being raped by an occupying soldier has not been given peace merely because nobody fires a weapon to defend her.
Just Defense therefore creates a positive duty to protect the innocent.
But it imposes equally serious obligations upon the defender.
Military force must remain a last practicable means rather than the first. Diplomacy, negotiation, deterrence, sanctions, evacuation, humanitarian intervention, and other nonviolent measures should precede destructive force whenever they can realistically protect the threatened population.
When force genuinely becomes necessary, its objective must remain protection—not revenge. Civilian immunity becomes central. The defender must continually ask whether the violence being employed is creating more human suffering than the violence it is intended to stop.
And modern biology gives this obligation an importance Augustine and Aquinas could never have understood.
War reaches into the womb
The casualties of war cannot be counted only among the dead.
A systematic review encompassing more than one million pregnancies exposed to armed conflicts found particularly persuasive evidence for increased low birth weight, with additional evidence concerning miscarriage, stillbirth, prematurity, premature rupture of membranes, and congenital abnormalities. More recent systematic research similarly associates prenatal wartime exposure with adverse fetal and neonatal development. [5][6]
We must be scientifically precise here. These findings should not be described simply as war “changing children’s genes.” Genetics and epigenetics are different.
Epigenetics concerns biological mechanisms regulating how genes are expressed without necessarily altering the underlying DNA sequence. One of those mechanisms is DNA methylation. [7]
And this is where modern research becomes extraordinary.
Research involving mothers and children exposed to war, sexual trauma, and other severe stresses has detected differences in DNA methylation associated with maternal trauma. Research following women subjected to sexual violence and torture during the Kosovo war likewise investigated altered methylation patterns and stress physiology in their children. The study reported higher cortisol levels and differential methylation at candidate stress-related genes in offspring whose mothers experienced PTSD symptoms during pregnancy, while no methylation differences reached corrected epigenome-wide significance. [8]
Most strikingly, a 2025 study examined three generations of Syrian refugee families exposed to violence. Researchers identified DNA-methylation signatures associated with violence exposure and found epigenetic-age acceleration associated with prenatal exposure. Because human intergenerational epigenetic research remains developing, we should not claim that every trauma is biologically “inherited,” or that these findings establish inevitable disease. But they provide serious evidence that the biological consequences of violence can extend beyond the person standing on the battlefield. [9]
A bomb can therefore have consequences long after its explosion.
War can affect a pregnant mother’s stress physiology, nutrition, healthcare, and environmental exposures. Those conditions can affect fetal development. Trauma can remain psychologically and biologically consequential long after armies withdraw.
The moral unit of warfare is therefore not merely the soldier whom you kill today.
It includes the woman displaced tomorrow.
The woman sexually assaulted under occupation.
The pregnant mother living beneath bombardment.
The developing child inside her.
And potentially biological consequences whose significance researchers are only beginning to understand.
That changes my conception of war.
Therefore, Just Defense
Just Defense does not say that Christians must watch innocent people be murdered because violence is intrinsically uncomfortable.
Nor does it give governments a theological blank check to wage war whenever they describe an adversary as evil.
It establishes a harder obligation:
Protect life. Resist grave aggression. Exhaust peaceful means wherever they can work. When force becomes genuinely necessary, use only what is required to protect the innocent. Distinguish combatants from civilians. Continually reassess proportionality. Provide refuge, medicine, and reconstruction. Stop fighting when the protective objective has been achieved. And remember that the enemy’s innocent children possess exactly the same human dignity as our own.
This principle must apply equally whether the threatened person is American, Iranian, Ukrainian, Russian, Israeli, Palestinian—or someone whose country we have never seen.
Perhaps that is where Just Defense differs most profoundly from ordinary ideas of war.
There are no foreign children.
There are only children.
And if modern warfare can injure human beings physically, psychologically, developmentally, and perhaps epigenetically across generations, then our moral responsibility cannot end when the shooting stops.
That, my Zayka, is why I would not discard Augustine and Aquinas.
I would carry their question forward.
Not Just War.
Just Defense.
Not: When may we destroy our enemy?
But:
What must we do to protect the innocent—and how do we accomplish it while creating the least possible suffering for the generations who come after us?
With all my love,
Konstantin Anthony Romanov
Research underlying this letter
[1] Stewart, Phil, et al. “Iranian Leader Khamenei Killed in Air Strikes as U.S., Israel Launch Attacks.” Reuters, 2026. https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/israel-us-launch-strikes-iran-2026-02-28/
[2] Vatican News. “Pope Leo XIV Renews Call for Peace During Flight to Spain.” 2026. https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2026-06/flight-presser-pope-leo-visit-spain-appeal-peace-journalists.html
[3] United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine. “UN Commission Concludes That Deportation and Forcible Transfer of Ukrainian Children by Russian Authorities, as Well as Enforced Disappearances, Amount to Crimes Against Humanity.” 2026. https://ukraine.un.org/en/311741-un-commission-concludes-deportation-and-forcible-transfer-ukrainian-children-russian
[4] Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. “Sexual Violence in the Context of the Russian Federation’s Full-Scale Armed Attack Against Ukraine.” 2026. https://ukraine.ohchr.org/en/Sexual-Violence-in-the-Context-of-the-Russian-Federation-Full-Scale-Armed-Attack-against-Ukraine
[5] Keasley, James, Jessica Blickwedel, and Siobhan Quenby. “Adverse Effects of Exposure to Armed Conflict on Pregnancy: A Systematic Review.” BMJ Global Health, vol. 2, no. 4, 2017, e000377. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2017-000377
[6] Riquelme-Gallego, Blanca, et al. “Adverse Fetal and Neonatal Impact of War Conflicts During Pregnancy: A Systematic Review.” IUBMB Life, vol. 77, no. 2, 2025, e70006. https://doi.org/10.1002/iub.70006
[7] National Human Genome Research Institute. “Methylation.” Genome.gov. https://www.genome.gov/genetics-glossary/Methylation
[8] Hjort, Line, et al. “Intergenerational Effects of Maternal Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder on Offspring Epigenetic Patterns and Cortisol Levels.” Epigenomics, vol. 13, no. 12, 2021, pp. 967–980. https://doi.org/10.2217/epi-2021-0015
[9] Mulligan, Connie J., et al. “Epigenetic Signatures of Intergenerational Exposure to Violence in Three Generations of Syrian Refugees.” Scientific Reports, vol. 15, 2025, article 5945. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-89818-z
It isn’t really all of it, now is it?
These things, these people, are not really very much at all. At its core is an agreement—one that they, try as hard as they might, have no part in.
It is a stark reality, one that is neither understood nor recognized, yet one of real importance to me: the wider world is entirely dependent upon it while remaining entirely incognizant of it.
You asked me a yes-or-no question. I answered yes.
So, formally, plainly, and without qualification:
Yes.
It ends there for them.
It began there for us.