This chapter maps the imaginative world through which Russian combatants come to feel the war. At its center stands the Motherland, not as a civic ideal but as a wounded feminine figure whose injury is carried as personal and whose desecration calls for response. Real women—wives, partners, imagined companions—appear only in fleeting outlines, their muted presence revealing how emotional attention shifts from the intimacy of everyday life to the promise of danger, clarity, and meaning. Within this landscape, violence becomes the fulfillment of hidden desires: longed-for revenge, displaced anger, and the performance of what is taken to be true masculinity. It is a space where men recast themselves as protectors, martyrs, outlaws, or figures borrowed from novels, games, and barracks lore. In this fusion of grievance, desire, and story, war becomes a way to restore meaning, and imagination becomes a manual for action.