Ethics – war – medicine: a scientific portrait of the problem in modern publications

Background: The search for the meaning of war, the justification of violence, the acceptance of guilt and other moral problems worried Russian thinkers of the 19th century. Russian religious philosophy considers morally justified only war in defense of the highest spiritual shrines, which I.A. Ilyin, N.A. Berdyaev, L.P. Karsavin, A.A. Kersnovsky and others call the defense of the home-land, life and peace. Aim: To assess research interest in the problems of ethics of war, ethics of military medicine, biomedical ethics in the intellectual field of open databases of scientific publications and offer a predictive plot of this scientific direction. Materials and methods: A comparative analysis of open databases of scientific publications RSCI, NEB, CyberLeninka was carried out. The study of literature sources in the problem field under consideration made it possible to determine the directions of the research search using vectors – keywords "ethics", "war", "military medicine". Publications from the open CyberLeninka data-base were used and analyzed as a model scientific network database. Quantitative (number of publications) and qualitative (annota-tions) indicators were studied. To identify attitudes towards the ethical problems of war, a sociological survey of medical university students was conducted, N = 154, average age of respondents (19.2 ± 1.9) years. Standards of confidentiality and autonomy were respected for respondents. Results: An analysis of the distribution of scientific publications by area of the international OECD classifier demonstrates the in-terest of researchers in the problem field of "Philosophy, ethics, religious studies" in 2020–2024. In all search options (using the key-words "War and Ethics", "War and Medicine", "Military Medicine") there are a larger number of publications in this area than in other social or sociological sciences. In the search query "war and ethics", there were 2 times more such publications than others. A pilot sur-vey of future doctors confirms the interdisciplinary connection between the ethics of war and medicine. Conclusion: The study demonstrates modern scientific interest in the ethics of war when studying problems related to war and mili-tary medicine. It would be of interest to conduct a more detailed study of the relationship between the ethics of war and medical ethics (bio-ethics) as an element of the ethical training of future doctors for professional activities in extreme conditions of peace and war.