The Coming War

Ukraine shows what our future holds

I have just come back from Ukraine, my first trip in quite an unusually long period away. Since I was last in Kyiv a couple of months back, much has changed. In the world, and in Ukraine, a microcosm for the cultural and informational struggles intensifying across the globe. The coming war will be waged over the same issues as in Ukraine now; in this way, Ukraine is the tomorrow transplanted into our today, the edge of all things and of future time. That in itself should terrify us.

That suggests that everything now and in our future is about Ukraine.

But it is not about Ukraine: in fact, it is time to forget about Ukraine. (Bear with me.) We have spent too much time focusing on that location and transplanting our concerns and efforts to a distant place. The war is coming here; it is coming for us.

Everything is connected

It is often hard to present personal impressions as anything other than anecdotal, but I had expected the Ukrainians to be in despair following further betrayals from their supposed friends and allies.

However, I noted in the places I visited, including in Kyiv, a strange sense of reconciled resilience. In fact, the slow erosion of concern and support from the outside world has evoked a sense of defiance, I felt, among the Ukrainians. At least, one friend told me, they know now the truth about the world, their future, and how they will stand alone.

Kyiv, March 2025, author’s own

I also felt a strange sense of connectedness, in a deeply personal manner which I had never previously experienced. That does sound pathetically glib, and in many ways goes beyond the sense of singular resilience I discerned among the Ukrainians. Part of it was emotional, I guess, relief and pleasure at being back in the country, despite the circumstances. But there was something more to it than this: a profound realisation of the fault lines across the entire world which find their current expression inside Ukraine. But I cannot see how they remain there.

I told people in Spring 2022 that I would be astonished if the war ended quickly, and even more surprised if it remained limited to Ukraine. That panicked and fevered time was awful, replaced now by a deeper fatigue and reconciliation. What seemed to many then as an isolated event, a quick Russian operation that would selfcorrect and permit time to progress as usual, has congealed into a spreading viscous understanding that the world has changed, a strange new mix of coerced reality and strange news reports that mutate and permeate across our perceptions. We require a new way of understanding the world and the relationship between events and their representation.

We also need to understand better coercive cognition, how various types of persuasion and force are used to shape our perceptions of reality.

I have previously argued how the aggressors in our new world are trying to reset the cultural relations in our societies, reestablishing hierarchies and forcing populations from horizontal understandings of the world to vertical structures of power.

Russia has been the model for many in this (though the Russians themselves have emulated regimes in Central Asia in their patrimonial political and social structures).

I have also argued how media has become key to this cognitive coercion. The representation of aggression and forced hierarchical relationships, in particular on television, normalises and legitimises the imposition of such structures ‘in real life’ (if this is still a reasonable phrase). Moreover, the attention-seizing economy, where we are fixated with what new-reality-TV stars say – no matter what they say – is crucial, as their ability to force us to watch them wield weird weapons of informational influence over us demonstrates their power over us, fixing us in the ruler-ruled relationship even when mediated through a screen. It does not matter if they say garbage or if we know that they are lying. In fact, their mendacity and speciousness is preferable, as it proves they can hold us no matter what they say or do. What if they deliberately create chaos or make mistakes, just so that you will watch them more intently?

Pushing the peace at any price

Violence is key to forcing people to accept new realities. No can one force this representation of violence, coercive cognition in the new age, as masterly as the Russians. Trump and his crew emulate, but they are amateurs in comparison. In fact, Putin highly likely knows how to use targeted representations of violence to push Trump’s thinking.

Trump is desperate for some kind of peace in Ukraine – not because he likes the Ukrainians, but because he is desperate for the glory of a peacemaker. The Russians know this. The awfulness of the situation is that the Russians also realise that the more brutal they are in Ukraine, the more this forces Trump’s hand and encourages him to secure some kind of ceasefire, no matter the cost. In this case, though, he realises that he only has latitude to press Kyiv for some kind, any kind, of deal. So we are in a hideous situation where the Russians have the incentive to escalate the killing.

Take your eyes off Ukraine for a moment: violence and careful messaging about its impact brings rewards in this world. Murdering children and civilians is becoming a viable political activity.

There are growing markers that Russia is preparing to use this approach on other countries. My previous work in the FCDO relied in part in developing indicators of aggression from a variety of sources, and to my mind now Russia is meeting some of those criteria. Moscow has already used nuclear and chemical weapons against the UK. It has committed acts of gross sabotage across Europe. Russia has said multiple times that it wants peace, but every time we engage with the Russian state, it exploits that relationship to its own ends.

To my mind, Russia has gone past the point of no return in its war. Its political, social, cultural, and economic structures are now so configured towards war, that I cannot possibly see how this can be reversed. Children in kindergartens are militarised.

And to those who say that Russia cannot even occupy the whole of Ukraine, I would warn that Russia does not need to occupy European countries. Its aim is to infiltrate and weaken the entire European security architecture, bend our policies to its will. They want to seize our perceptions and our time, and shape our futures. Russia has several ways to do that, and all of them are hostile.

So it’s time to refocus from Ukraine. This war was never just about Ukraine, though we have grossly failed the Ukrainians by not realising this sooner. It is about us. They are coming for us. And we are not ready.

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