A new culture of warfare

Two Ukrainian tanks in eastern Ukraine (Photo: Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

For the most part, our generation has managed to evade conflict. Many of us will have seen it in forms, of course, but the photos have come from places far from our shores and we have been voyeurs and judges – not participants or witnesses. There was a swift change in March of this year when Putin invaded Ukraine: instead of authoritarian states and groups of rebels or insurgents, there were clear camps of the ‘goodies’ and the ‘baddies’ – flags were flown, foreign lullabies sung, even TikToks of President Zelensky dancing the samba. The war was commodified, chocolate-box-ified.

The major conflicts of the twenty first century have been polarising and controversial. They have ignited violent prejudices within our society and contributed to systemic breaks within our culture: but we did not see them. Directly speaking, the casualties within our borders were collateral damage and reactionary. The so-called ‘War on Terror’ is unspecific, clumsy, and impossible to interpret – let alone define.

Rolling news and tabloid headlines cling to an effect of immediate gratification in gore or shock. The wars our generation witnessed clung to this, our understandings twisted to fit agendas and policies, carefully shrouding the ridiculousness of why on earth we were there in the first place. The war in Ukraine marks a strange lurch in the opposite direction.

Whilst the TikToks of Zelensky have calmed down, more than six months after the initial invasion, our streets are still fluttering with canary yellow and sky blue. This solidarity is sweet to say the least, even if hugely performative. But as Ukraine successfully pushes back on their new iron curtain, our connection with the war in Ukraine, the opposite side of Europe, does ring strange.

We have divorced ourselves from the true realities of what the significance of a war in Ukraine is. Our solidarity has seemed to imply that we are somehow on the same plane as them, that we can understand their suffering on an intimate level. This overestimated empathy belittles the true realities of the human experiences. The Russian forces are aiming at civilians.

Eyewitness accounts from the southern city of Zaporizhzhia describe the violent attack from the Russians onto residential buildings: a child as young as three has been recorded amongst the injured and seven are confirmed dead.

When faced with events like this, of course solidarity is important, but surely it could come in more constructive forms? There is cause for our concern with the war, of course, if a successful referendum is held in Donbas and it nominally becomes a part of Russia, any nation who has sent arms will have thereby done so to Russian territory, thus creating a military belligerence. So, why is that not a primary concern in the public conscience? Surely there is a better way to display our empathies when they genuinely could become a reality.

There is an element of novelty with the war in Ukraine: perhaps since most of the conflicts we have seen through our lives have occupied more of a grey area and have taken place much further afield. We can see and arguably feel closer to the realities of the war in Ukraine because of how much closer it is to us, but this comes at the expense of truly respecting the conflict. The voyeuristic nature of our support for Ukraine is no different from how we would view an action movie or video game and the nature of our media does not help this.

An important turn in the correct direction recently is the proclamation that Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian civil rights campaigners have been named Nobel Peace Prize winners for this year. On 7th October, the winners were announced to be Ales Bialiatski (a Belarusian human rights advocate), a Ukrainian human rights organisation (The Centre for Civil Liberties) and the Russian human rights organisation, Memorial. The latter two groups that have made a conscientious effort to record the war crimes and human rights abuses that have taken place, particularly during the war in Donbas. Memorial was actually ordered to close down by the Russian government earlier this year through claims it was involved with foreign agents.

The bookies’ favourite to win was, no doubt, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy himself, however that would have been much too on the nose for Putin. When the chairwoman of the Nobel committee, Berit Reiss Anderson, was asked about whether the announced winners were supposed to send a message to Putin (on his 70th birthday no less) she responded with a clear no.

Reiss Anderson did, however, highlight that ‘the attention that President Putin has drawn on himself, that's relevant in this context, is on civil society and human rights advocates being suppressed’ (BBC News).

This is the show of solidarity that is needed in times like these. Not a direct nod to the war itself, nor placing it in a fanfare, but respect and dignity given to the victims and those helping them. Support and recognition mean more than this, as it means more than flag waving; but there is something much less performative about these prize decisions and a bravery in recognising these winners from the committee itself.

The truth is that we just do not understand how to react to war – let alone one that could creep closer to us. We started off silly - we added more empathy – I think we just lack realism. It’s true that social media and modern journalism have distorted our view on the world, but it is crucial to remember that there is always another side to what we see on our phone screens.