The Hard Centre

The Lvivski New Year's wish-list: We want a hard centre, and not just in our sweets.

2025 has not been a good year, by any stretch.

The disconnect between military developments on the front and perceptions/impact of military events has widened. Several military analysts insist that Russia cannot be winning in Ukraine.

But that is not the point. This is not a war of military conquest, this is a war predominantly on cognitive systems in Europe, an attempt to weaken Europe’s resistance to Moscow’s influence—dominance—across the continent. In many ways, it does not matter what happens on the ground, how many Russians die: it benefits the Kremlin in some ways to drag this war out, as it increases the fractures and pessimism across Europe.

Giving up the enslaved areas of Ukraine now for the sake of a false peace would be critical for the cognitive war. It would signal that Europe is powerless to defend its values across its lands. It would give succour to those who argue that all the fighting from Ukraine and the (though shamefully restrained) support from Europe was in vain, fundamentally weakening further resistance to Russians’ messaging and their cause.

It would critically weaken Ukraine as a state, but also the cognitive processes (positive, cataphatic, horizontal) and social methodologies that the Ukrainians have been defending on our behalf. This is the Kremlin’s Anti-Ukraine project, the execution and justification of barbaric measures to legitimise its influence in Europe.

The weird distance between military events and perception has perhaps been most notable in US politics, where Russian information manipulation has almost certainly influenced the White House’s decision making.

The war against Russia must be won, but it must be won in the right way. Nobody has explained how that can be done. I do not yet know, other than an extreme victory which few liberal-minded would support. In the spirit of not knowing answers, Lvivski poses the questions and wishes for the year ahead:

• We need to understand the domain in which Moscow is waging war against us. Because it is a war, an attempt to destroy our society, our civilisation, our country. The development of ‘disinformation’ as an academic discipline, the focus on information manipulation as a device in itself, as numbed our ability and concern to accept this threat as something violently hostile, existential to us. We need to think through concepts such as ‘hybrid war’ and comprehend the holistic nature of the problem. Quickly. This year’s UK Strategic Defence Review failed to manage that balance, dismissing the need to grasp the cognitive aspect of the war.

• We need to forget Ukraine as a humanitarian cause. Russia’s war is not just against Ukraine, it is using its war there as a cognitive attack on us. We must understand this as a national security threat to our country, and devote effort into comprehending this threat, and explaining it to our people that strengthens resilience without causing panic.

• We need to include Ukraine properly in our security thinking and strategies.

• We need to direct proper funding to our military, intelligence, and other bodies studying the wide spectrums of threats against us.

• We need to overcome the reflexive fear of Russia losing, weighing up the consequences of its defeat properly against the potential impact of it scoring a cognitive victory against Ukraine, and us.

• This requires a proper restructuring of our intelligence architecture, a development of our analytical capabilities, and new relationships between government, nongovernment bodies, and academia: in intent, processes, and capabilities.

• We need a hard centre in the UK. And in other countries. We need a renewal of centrist politics that connects with our national mission and our national security. This must also include a renewal of our institutions, and a better explanation (dare I say strategic communications?) of their importance for our society.

• The UK’s national security is linked with stability in Europe, and has been for centuries. We need to shed our risk-awareness, and embrace the reality that Ukraine is upholding our national security on our behalf. Ukrainians continue to die for us, every day. Admitting that focusing on our interests and our future inevitably involves a reconsideration—and reexplanation—of our relationship with Ukraine, and a strengthening of our own political centre, is the only way forward.