“Some things are up to us, and some are not.” — Epictetus, Enchiridion
I’ve been following the campaign around Crimea closely these past few weeks, and something about the shape of it has stuck with me — not the politics of it, which I’ll leave to people better qualified than a Stoicism newsletter, but the strategy.
For a long time, the instinct — mine included — was to imagine this kind of war ending the way wars end in movies: one decisive battle, a line on a map that moves all at once, a single dramatic turn. That’s not what’s happening. What’s happening, by most independent accounts, is slower and less cinematic than that. Ukraine appears to have shifted its approach around Crimea from scattered strikes to something more sustained and methodical — degrading fuel depots, air defense, bridges, and rail lines, and increasingly, ships. Reporting from the Crimea Platform and United24 put the numbers in the range of ninety to over a hundred Russian vessels struck in single-week windows in early-to-mid July, Kerch Strait ferry capacity down as much as 75%, and passage through the Don-Azov Canal temporarily suspended. Officials in the Ukrainian defense establishment reportedly describe the goal plainly: make Crimea an island. Not take it back in an afternoon. Isolate it, patiently, until what’s left is unsustainable.
I want to be careful here, because there is nothing abstract about what’s underneath these numbers. Fuel shortages mean real hardship for civilians who didn’t choose any of this. Soldiers and sailors on both sides are dying to move these lines a few feet. None of what follows is meant to look past that, or to treat a war as a metaphor for personal growth as if the two were morally equivalent. They aren’t. But strategy is still strategy, and there’s a lesson in the shape of this one that I think the Stoics would have recognized immediately.
Epictetus opens the Enchiridion with the line above, and it is, I think, the single most practical sentence in the entire Stoic tradition. Some things are up to us. Most things are not. The discipline — the entire discipline — is in telling the difference, and then acting only on the part that’s actually yours.
You cannot, by force of will, make an occupying army leave. You cannot, by wanting it badly enough, win a war in one stroke. Those are not up to you. What is up to you — if you are a small nation with limited resources fighting a much larger one — is which supply line you interdict this week. Which fuel depot. Which ship. Not the whole war. One controllable piece of it, repeated, day after day, until the accumulated weight of a hundred small, boring, unglamorous actions does what no single grand gesture could.
This is not a new idea, dressed up in modern hardware. It’s premeditatio turned outward into strategy: stop grieving the size of the problem you can’t solve, and go to work on the piece you can. The Stoics called this the dichotomy of control. Military strategists call it interdiction. It’s the same discipline wearing different clothes.
Most of us are not fighting wars. But most of us are, at some point, staring at a problem that feels too large to move — a career that isn’t working, a health situation that won’t resolve, a relationship that needs more than one conversation can fix — and reaching for the same fantasy Hollywood sold us: the single decisive moment that changes everything at once. It rarely comes. What works, almost every time, looks more like the campaign around Crimea than like a movie. Smaller. Slower. Aimed precisely at the one thing within reach this week, not the whole occupied territory of the problem.
The Practice
Pick one problem in your life that currently feels too big to solve in one move — because it probably is. Don’t try to solve the whole thing this week. Instead, ask: what is the one supply line I can actually interdict right now? Not the war. Just the fuel depot. Do that one thing. Then do it again next week.
See you next Saturday. — Phil
Based on reporting from the Crimea Platform’s weekly situation updates, United24 Media, and the Council on Foreign Relations’ Global Conflict Tracker, current as of mid-July 2026.