The dystopia of war (La distopía de la guerra)

On Monday, Le Monde reported on one of Ukraine’s flagship construction projects, very much in line with the limited possibilities for reconstruction under wartime conditions and the needs of the moment: a large military cemetery. According to the French outlet, the site will have a bunker to protect against possible bombing—although the dead have not been a specific target of Russian troops, as they have been of Israeli troops in Gaza—places to pay tribute to fallen warriors, and more space to bury soldiers now that existing cemeteries are overflowing. Without even minimally realistic data on casualties in either army, the warnings from sympathetic journalists are indicative when they state, as one Ukrainian blogger recently did, that “currently, the Ukrainian Armed Forces lack infantry. Completely. The infantry has fled, is in the hospital, or in the cemetery.” The growth of cemeteries is undoubtedly another important indicator. According to Le Monde , the new facilities will initially house graves, although the number could reach 130,000 or 160,000 in the future, indicating the current very high level of casualties and the possibility that such losses will continue in the future.

However, neither the number of casualties nor the accumulated destruction in the country are sufficient reason to moderate Ukraine’s aspirations for what it can achieve through military means or through the use of ultimatums. Hiding behind international law, the defense of the European continent, or the will of the population, Ukraine insists on the obligation to restore the country’s territorial integrity according to its 1991 borders. This lacks realism, would have to happen against the opinion of the population in places like Crimea and Donbass, and is a recipe for perpetuating an eternal conflict, whether or not it is at the military level. And despite the possibility that face-to-face talks will resume tomorrow between the delegations led by Vladimir Medinsky and Rustem Umerov, who was dismissed as Ukrainian Defense Minister to be appointed Chairman of the National Defense and Security Council, the likelihood of the conflict shifting from the military to the purely political level remains slim.

In the three and a half years since the February 2022 invasion, neither the progressive escalation nor the increasing use of Western weapons against Russian territory, nor threats and different versions of the same ultimatum have managed to get Russia to give in and surrender to conditions that bear little relation to the reality on the ground and the balance of forces that indicate the strength of the front and the rear. The Ukrainian response is a discourse constantly proclaiming that war is the raison d’être of the Putin regime, which cannot give in, since the absence of war would be the end of the political framework that sustains it. “Russia neither wants nor can, of its own volition, end the hostilities that have become its way of life. The Kremlin has turned war into an effective model of state governance, an ideal tool for controlling internal dynamics. War silences social discontent, distracts from economic failures, and ultimately helps consolidate the regime’s grip on power,” wrote Mykhailo Podolyak, for example, who in this passage also perfectly describes the Zelensky government’s attitude toward war, its use for the accumulation of power and internal control, and the fact that military conflict has become the state’s raison d’être.

Two initiatives that have gained media attention are indicative of this trend. “Payment for performance in war. Ukraine introduces gamification in the military [As an economist, I’m pleased. Anyone want to contribute to an article?],” wrote Tymofiy Mylovanov, a current academic and former Minister of Economy under Volodymyr Zelensky—one of the many men of military age who advocate continuing to fight but live abroad—on social media on July 14. The former minister was referring to an article published by The Economist in which the British magazine explained that gamification is a “term coined in the early 2000s, has been used in many fields, from health care and customer-loyalty programmes to education and workplace productivity. Participants score points; leader boards, progress bars, levels and badges tend to feature. In some cases points can be translated into rewards beyond the satisfaction of game-defined “winning.””

“Gamification came to the drone war in August 2024, when the Army of Drones, a government-backed initiative to acquire drones for the armed forces, launched a “bonus” system.” writes The Economist, adding, coolly despite dealing with matters of life and death, that “drone warfare is well suited for gamification because all kills are recorded by the same drone cameras that are used for flying the aircraft and a system already exists.” The flippancy in the use of video game logic applied to warfare is not limited to the now-official media, but comes directly from the authorities who created the system. “The system ensures that successful drone operators get new drones before their less effective colleagues do. Now the process is being upgraded with what Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s digital-transformation minister, has called “Amazon for the military”—a scheme that allows units to buy battlefield kit with points won by destroying Russian vehicles and other targets,” the article writes, describing the initiative. The war scenario is presented as a game, although it is also a reflection of rampant capitalism, where everything is for sale and even death can be an object of material gain.

War is not only a privileged setting for putting the techniques of capital into practice, but also opens the door to the militarization of all aspects of life and serves as a testing ground for the weapons of the future. This idea is not new and was one of the key slogans of Oleksii Reznikov, the minister who in 2020 said of Donbass that “our goal is not to recover it, like an oncological tumor that we don’t know what to do with. But we understand that we have two options. These are territories that are also mentally ill. There is the option of complete removal, amputation, or cure. I am in favor of therapy and the restoration of our entire body.” The defense minister, who had compared Donbass to a tumor, wrote an article in the Financial Times in 2022 in which he offered the Ukrainian theater of operations as a stage where various companies could test their weapons in combat situations. “We are sharing all the information and experience with our partners,” he declared at an Atlantic Council event, where he insisted that “we are interested in testing modern systems in the fight against the enemy, and we invite arms manufacturers to test new products here.” “An unbeatable laboratory for the global arms industry,” he insisted in 2023, appealing to the initiative of companies and authorities in Kyiv’s allied countries.

Now, however, it is no longer just a wish, but an official initiative by the same minister who has introduced war as a video game in which you kill to earn points to redeem in the form of more drones with which to continue killing. “Ukraine has unveiled a new initiative allowing foreign defense companies to test their technologies under real battlefield conditions,” announced Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov during an online speech at the LANDEURO defense conference in Wiesbaden, reported the official Ukrainian media outlet United24 last week. With this initiative, Ukraine is simply making official state policy the desire that the authorities have expressed since 2022: that the West take advantage of the Ukrainian military scenario to massively send its current weapons or those it is developing for the future to be tested against Russian weapons in combat situations and collaborate in the common cause of the war against Moscow. This time, the language is not that of video games but the purest advertising message. “Want to test your drones in combat? Ukraine has a platform for that,” reads the headline of the article, which, of course, seeks to present the initiative not as an element of proxy warfare or a sign of desperation, but as a measure of Kyiv’s generosity and altruism.

“Ukraine has already built a unique infrastructure for the rapid development of defense innovation,” Fedorov insists in the article, failing to acknowledge that Russian innovations are causing far more damage in Ukraine on a daily basis than Ukrainian ones in Russia, despite successes such as Operation Spider Web. “We are ready to help partner countries develop, test, and improve technologies that actually work in combat. This is an opportunity to gain experience that simply cannot be replicated in a laboratory,” the minister insists. Ukraine offers assistance to improve its partners’ technologies, a useful euphemism to camouflage the umpteenth plea for even more weapons to sustain a long-term war it cannot win and in which it is willing to offer its territory as a testing ground, its population as a human shield, and its army as a guinea pig against which to test Russia’s response.