The War on Reality: Four Years of Ukraine
On February 24, 2022, Russia began a war against Ukraine. The premise of this war was that Ukraine did not exist. There was no state. There was no nation. There was only a misunderstanding, a fiction to be corrected by violence. Vladimir Putin called it “a special military operation” (Eruygur, 2026). Four words intended to replace reality.
To understand this war, we must begin with the lie. The lie is the key. In Moscow’s telling, it is Ukraine that told the first lie — that it was ever a nation at all. To the Kremlin, Ukrainian nationhood is a fiction, a Western invention, a historical error. They insist the truth is that Ukraine has always been Russia, that Kyiv is a Russian city, that the people who live there are simply confused Russians who need to be brought home.
This is the deepest lie of all, because it inverts history itself. Volodymyr the Great ruled from Kyiv in the year 988, when Moscow was not yet a clearing in the forest. Kyiv was the cradle of Eastern Slavic civilisation centuries before the Russian state existed. The claim that Ukraine is not real is not an erasure of history, which gives the permission slip for everything that follows. If a nation does not exist, then its people can be killed. If a state is not real, then its borders can be erased. If a culture is not real, then its cities can be levelled, its children deported, its language forbidden. The war on Ukraine is a war on reality itself.
After four years, we can see the consequences of this war on reality. We see it in the casualty figures, in the ruined cities, in the refugee flows. But we also see it in ourselves. We see it in the way we have accepted, or ignored, or become tired of a war of colonial conquest in the heart of Europe. We see it in the way the most powerful democracy in the world abandoned its ally; in the way Europe slept for thirty years and is only now waking up. This war is a test of our ability to distinguish truth from falsehood, to defend the principles of international law, and to see the humanity of others. It is a test we are in danger of failing.
The Fiction of the Special Military Operation
When Russia invaded Ukraine, it did so under a false pretext. The goals, as stated by Vladimir Putin, were the “demilitarization” and “denazification” of Ukraine (Eruygur, 2026). This was a fiction. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is Jewish. His grandfather fought the Nazis. The claim of “denazification” was meant to confuse. It was the practice of calling others fascists while behaving like a fascist yourself. The word “denazification” was a weapon designed to make the victim seem like the aggressor, to invert reality so completely that the truth becomes impossible to see. This is how modern authoritarianism works. It lies and destroys the very framework within which truth and falsehood can be distinguished.
Russia’s initial plan was for a quick, decisive victory. A 64-kilometre convoy of military vehicles would roll into Kyiv. The Ukrainian government would collapse within days. A puppet regime would be installed. Zelenskyy would flee or be killed… but his did not transpire.
The Ukrainian people resisted. The Ukrainian army fought back. The convoy stalled, ran out of fuel, and was destroyed. The highways to Kyiv became graveyards of Russian ambition. The Kremlin, drunk on its own propaganda, had believed its own myths of Ukrainian weakness, its own fantasies of a brotherly people yearning to be liberated. It was a catastrophic miscalculation. By April 2022, Russian forces were in retreat from Kyiv, leaving behind a landscape of ruin and a people forged into a single, unbreakable will (Eruygur, 2026).
The failure of the initial invasion led to an escalation in Moscow. If Ukraine could not be conquered quickly, it would be destroyed slowly. The mask of the “special military operation” slipped, revealing the face of a war of annihilation. Russia shifted its strategy from a war of manoeuvre to a war of attrition. It began a systematic campaign of terror against the civilian population. In September 2022, Russia staged sham referendums and annexed four Ukrainian regions it did not fully control (Eruygur, 2026). This was a declaration of permanent war.
What followed was not a story of hardened resistance because Ukrainian people did not give up. They could not, because they knew the truth — that this was their land, their future, their reality — and no amount of Russian firepower could make that untrue. In the autumn of 2022, a Ukrainian counter-offensive liberated the city of Kherson, a significant victory that sent a wave of hope across the world (Eruygur, 2026). But the front lines soon solidified into a thousand-kilometre scar of trenches and minefields. Russia, with its larger population, absorbed staggering losses and continued to feed men into the furnace. It compensated for its tactical failures with the sheer mass of its population, sending wave after wave of conscripts and convicts into the killing fields. A brief, daring Ukrainian incursion into Russia’s Kursk region in August 2024 was a flash of defiance, but it could not change the fundamental arithmetic of the war (Eruygur, 2026).
After four years, Russia occupies 19.4 percent of Ukraine. In the past year, it has gained just 0.79 percent of Ukrainian territory (PBS, 2026). A sliver of land, purchased with a mountain of corpses. It is a ratio of death to dirt that has no precedent in modern warfare.
Consider what this means. The largest country in Europe, with the largest army in Europe, backed by a nuclear arsenal and a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, has spent four years, a million soldiers, and hundreds of billions of dollars to gain less than one percent of a neighbouring country’s territory in a single year. This is the performance of strength by a state that has confused destruction with victory. The Kremlin has demonstrated that it can kill, but it has not demonstrated that it can win. That distinction matters, because it tells us something important about the nature of this war. Russia is not fighting to achieve a strategic objective, but because it cannot stop. It has trapped itself in a war it cannot win and cannot afford to lose. The “special military operation” has become the defining fact of the Russian state, the black hole around which everything else now orbits.
The Reality of the Atrocities
The numbers are a record of the crime. Up to 1.8 million casualties on both sides (PBS, 2026). Of these, an estimated 1.2 million are Russian soldiers, the largest loss of life for any major power in any conflict since the Second World War (PBS, 2026). Ukraine’s losses are a wound carved into the heart of a nation: up to 600,000 military casualties, a generation of its bravest sacrificed on the altar of freedom (PBS, 2026). They are sons, daughters, fathers, mothers. They are the empty chairs at dinner tables from Odesa to Kharkiv, the unanswered phones, the photographs on mantlepieces that will never be updated.
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The civilian toll is immense. The United Nations has confirmed more than 15,000 civilian deaths, but admits the true number is far higher, because many areas remain under Russian occupation and cannot be independently assessed (UN News, 2026). At least 763 children have been confirmed killed, their futures stolen before they had begun, their names added to a ledger of grief that grows longer with every passing day (PBS, 2026). 2025 was the deadliest year for civilians since the initial invasion, with 2,514 killed and 12,142 injured, a 31 percent increase over 2024 and a staggering 71 percent increase over 2023 (CARE, 2026). Civilian casualties caused by short-range drones — cheap, ubiquitous instruments of terror that turn the sky into a weapon — rose by 120 percent in 2025 alone, killing 577 and injuring 3,288 (CARE, 2026).
We must look at the nature of the violence. In Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv, Russian soldiers carried out summary executions of civilians. Men were shot in the back of the head with their hands tied. Bodies were left to rot in the streets. Mass graves were filled with the tortured and the executed. A UN investigation confirmed these as deliberate acts, not the fog of war, but a calculated policy of terror (OHCHR, 2022). Bucha was a blueprint.
The same logic was applied to Mariupol, a once-thriving port city of nearly half a million people. For 86 days, its defenders held out in the tunnels of the Azovstal steel plant, a modern-day Thermopylae. The city was starved, shelled, and bombed into submission. Its maternity wards and operating theatres were targeted — the latter sheltering hundreds of children, with the word “children” written in giant letters visible from the air. The World Health Organization has documented 2,881 Russian attacks on medical facilities since the start of the invasion, with a 20 percent increase in 2025 (PBS, 2026). Hospitals, the places where we go to be healed, turned into targets.
Across the occupied territories, Russia has established a system of filtration camps and torture chambers. The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture has documented a systematic policy of sexual violence — rape, genital electrocution, simulated drowning, mock executions — used to terrorise the population (OHCHR, 2025). This is colonial practice; what empires do to the people they deem subhuman. This is the reality of the “special military operation.”
But the war on reality is also a war on the future. One of the most disturbing expressions of this is the systematic deportation of Ukrainian children. An estimated 19,546 children have been forcibly transferred from occupied territories to Russia, stripped of their identities, and placed with Russian families (Zubova, 2026). This is the practice of genocide, as defined by the 1948 convention: the forcible transfer of children of the group to another group. It is an attempt to kill a nation not just in the present, but in the future. For this crime, the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin and his commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova (ICC, 2023). The man the American president courts as a peacemaker is a wanted war criminal, accused of stealing children. This is the reality Trump chooses to ignore. To him, 19,546 stolen children are a barrier to a mineral deal. An inconvenience to be forgotten so that Putin’s demands can be accepted. An insistence on justice that proves, in his mind, that Zelenskyy is the problem.
Russia has also opened a war on winter. More than 60 massive, coordinated attacks have been launched against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, damaging every single power plant in the country (DiXi Group, 2026; CARE, 2026). The goal is simple and medieval: to plunge the country into darkness and cold, to weaponise the freezing temperatures of the Ukrainian winter, and to make life so unbearable that the will to resist breaks. Imagine a winter without heat, without light, without the hum of a fridge or the glow of a bedside lamp. Imagine your children doing their homework by candlelight, or your elderly parents shivering under every blanket in the house. Imagine that winter lasting for months, while the sky screams with the sound of incoming military equipment. That is the reality for millions of Ukrainians, deliberately and methodically engineered in Moscow.
Nearly 6 million Ukrainians have fled the country, with 5.3 million scattered across Europe, while another 3.7 million remain internally displaced (PBS, 2026). They are the living evidence of the crime.
There is a pattern here, and it is worth naming. The executions in Bucha, the siege of Mariupol, the torture chambers, the sexual violence, the deportation of children, the destruction of energy infrastructure, are deliberate, systematic, and coordinated. Each one serves the same purpose: to make Ukrainian existence so unbearable that the will to resist breaks. None of it is new. Every occupying power in history has reached for the same playbook. But Russia is doing all of this, right now, in the twenty-first century, in Europe, while the world watches. The question is not whether we know. We know. The question is what we are willing to do about it.
The American Betrayal
For a time, the West was united. The shock of the invasion forged a rare and delicate solidarity. Sanctions were imposed. Weapons flowed. The rhetoric from Western capitals was a chorus of resolve. “As long as it takes,” they promised. The words were beautiful. They were also, as it turned out, a lie.
The unity was real, but it was fragile. It depended on a particular configuration of American politics: a president who believed in alliances, a Congress that could still pass bipartisan legislation, a public that still remembered why NATO existed. When that configuration changed, the unity collapsed. This is the lesson: solidarity that depends on the goodwill of a single leader in a single country is not solidarity at all. It is a dependency. And dependencies can be severed.
The return of Donald Trump to the White House in January 2025 was a geopolitical earthquake. His administration immediately signalled its hostility to Ukraine and its desire for a deal with Russia (Foreign Policy, 2026). It was a change in both tactics and worldview. For the Trump administration, international relations are less about alliances or values, and more about transactions. Ukraine was not a nation fighting for its survival, but a line item on a balance sheet. The language of “peace” was deployed, but it was not peace that was being pursued. It was capitulation dressed in the language of diplomacy. A “deal” with Russia, on Russia’s terms, is not peace. It is the ratification of conquest. It is the acceptance of the principle that borders can be redrawn by force. Once that principle is accepted, it does not stop at Ukraine.
When the American president tells us that Vladimir Putin “wants what is best for Ukraine,” this is the war on reality brought to the heart of the West. It is the aggressor’s fiction, spoken by the leader of the free world. When the American president blames Zelenskyy, the leader of the invaded country, the man whose cities are burning, whose children are being killed, for the absence of peace, the inversion is complete. The victim becomes the obstacle. The aggressor becomes the peacemaker. When Zelenskyy is accused of trying to start a third world war — a man who has spent four years begging the world for the means to defend his own people — the absurdity becomes obscene. The man who started the war is excused. The man who is trying to survive it is blamed. This is unreality, imported wholesale from Moscow and installed in the Oval Office. Ukraine is not lost; it fights on, with or without America. But when the American president accepts the Kremlin’s version of reality, he is lost. He is no longer an honest broker. He is no longer a mediator. He is an asset — a willing amplifier of Russia’s war on truth, laundering the aggressor’s narrative through the most powerful office on earth.
The moment of ultimate betrayal, which we have previously detailed here on Plague Island, was the Oval Office ambush of President Zelenskyy on February 28, 2025. An American president publicly sided with a dictator against a democratic ally (Council on Foreign Relations, 2025; American Progress, 2025). The message was clear. America’s commitment to Ukraine was over.
The consequences were immediate. While around $1 billion per month in military equipment contracted under the Biden administration continued to arrive — a ghost ship from a forgotten era — all new direct aid was choked off (CSIS, 2026). New US military aid commitments to Ukraine dropped by 99 percent in 2025 (Kiel Institute, 2026).
In place of aid, the Trump administration offered sales. A new mechanism, the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List (PURL), was established in July 2025, allowing European countries to purchase US equipment to send to Ukraine (CSIS, 2026). Over $4.8 billion in European money has flowed through this system (CSIS, 2026). The United States was no longer the arsenal of democracy. It was an arms dealer.
The most devastating blow was delivered in the shadows. In March 2025, the Trump administration “paused” the sharing of vital intelligence with Ukraine (The New York Times, 2025; BBC, 2025). This was an act of sabotage. Without real-time satellite imagery and signals intelligence, the Ukrainian military was fighting blind. It was an act of war against an ally.
The message was received in Moscow with quiet satisfaction. With American support withdrawn, Russia escalated. The bombardment of civilian infrastructure intensified. The front lines were reinforced. The Kremlin’s negotiating position hardened. Why offer concessions when your opponent’s most powerful backer has switched sides?
This is the logic of appeasement, and it is as old as the twentieth century. When a democracy signals that it will not defend its principles, the aggressor becomes more ambitious. The Trump administration’s betrayal made the possibility of peace more distant, costly, and more likely to be concluded on terms that reward the aggressor. It sent a message not just to Moscow, but to every authoritarian regime on earth: that American commitments are temporary, that American alliances are transactional, and that a superpower’s word can be reversed by a single election. This is the most consequential act of American foreign policy sabotage since the abandonment of the Kurds in Syria. Its consequences will reverberate for decades.
Europe’s Awakening
For decades, Europe lived in a post-historical fantasy. Because it believed that war was a thing of the past, it disarmed and grew dependent on Russian energy. Germany, the continent’s economic powerhouse, built its entire post-Cold War identity on the belief that trading with a petrostate would democratise it — a policy of Wandel durch Handel (change through trade) that in reality did nothing but fill Putin’s war chest and hand him the energy weapon he would one day turn against them (Al Jazeera, 2026). It was a generation of leaders who had forgotten the first rule of history: that peace is not a gift. It is a prize that must be won, and defended, by every generation.
European leaders were naïve enough to choose cheap Russian gas over energy independence, trade over security. They chose comfort over preparedness. They told themselves a story about the end of history, about the triumph of liberal democracy, about the obsolescence of military power. It was dangerous because it left them unprepared for the moment when history returned — as it always does.
But the complacency ran deeper than energy policy. For decades, Europe had been swept along in America’s version of reality. It followed America into Iraq and Afghanistan. It accepted the logic of dollar diplomacy, of American-led coalitions, of a world order underwritten by Washington. Reality was what America said it was. And when that borrowed reality collapsed — when Trump abandoned Ukraine and made it clear that American commitments were worth nothing — Europe was not just strategically exposed but existentially disoriented. The fever dream of the American-led order broke, and Europe woke up to the world as it really is: dangerous, multipolar, and indifferent to nations that cannot defend themselves.
In the year following the US aid cutoff, European military support for Ukraine surged by 67 percent (Barbieri, 2026). The European Union, a bureaucratic super vehicle that normally moves at glacial speed, found a velocity it did not know it possessed, approving a €90 billion loan to Ukraine for budgetary and military support (Barbieri, 2026). A new defence industrial strategy began to take shape, with initiatives like the €150 billion SAFE fund designed to ramp up ammunition production and the “Build in Ukraine” strategy aimed at fostering a domestic arms industry (Kiel Institute, 2026). For the first time since the Cold War, European leaders were speaking the language of strategic autonomy not as an academic abstraction, but as a matter of survival.
These are significant steps and should not be dismissed. But they must also be seen in context. For 30 years, Europe outsourced its security to the United States while allowing its armies to atrophy. It allowed its defence industries to consolidate and shrink, building an economic model that depended on cheap Russian energy and American military protection simultaneously. Unwinding all of that in a single year is not possible. But beginning to unwind it is essential, and that process has now started. The question is whether it will be sustained.
The awakening was slow and incomplete, though. Total aid to Ukraine in 2025 still fell by 13 percent, because Europe’s surge could not fully plug the hole left by America’s departure (Kiel Institute, 2026). Europe was trying to make up for thirty years of neglect in 12 months.
The history of the twentieth century teaches us that democracies are slow to respond to threats, but that when they do respond, they can be formidable. The question is always whether the response comes in time. In the 1930s, it did not. The democracies of Europe slept while fascism armed, and by the time they woke, the cost of resistance had become almost unbearable. We are in a similar moment now. Europe has begun to move. The direction is right, but the speed is not yet sufficient. The gap between what Europe is doing and what Ukraine needs remains dangerously wide. Closing that gap is not a matter of generosity, but self-preservation.
The Choice
The war in Ukraine has revealed the shape of a new world. The post-Cold War order is over. The institutions that were meant to keep the peace — the United Nations, the OSCE — have been exposed as impotent. Their resolutions are ignored; their charters are shredded.
Inside Russia, the last vestiges of dissent have been extinguished. Two million of its brightest citizens have fled the country, a mass exodus of talent that has left behind a population cowed into silence by draconian censorship laws (Vorobyov, 2026). The state has become a garrison, its economy a war machine fuelled by oil revenues that still flow, shamefully, through intermediaries from the very European nations Russia is trying to destroy. Its people are fed a steady diet of paranoid nationalism and imperial nostalgia, a population trapped in a hall of mirrors where the only permitted truth is the one broadcast from the Kremlin.
This is what happens when unreality wins. Russia is weaker for this war. It has lost a generation of young men, lost its best-educated citizens to emigration, and lost its access to Western technology and capital. It has gained a few hundred square kilometres of shattered earth. But the regime cannot admit this, because to admit it would be to admit that the entire premise of the war was false. And this is the most dangerous thing about Putin: he believes it. This is not a cynical leader manipulating a narrative he knows to be untrue, but a man who has lived inside his own unreality for so long that it has become the only world he can see. He believes Ukraine is not real and that Russia is under threat. He believes the West is the aggressor. And he needs every Russian to believe it too. The war is the vehicle for that belief; the furnace in which a nation is forged into a single, obedient mass, united by a grievance that is not real but that feels real because their sons are dying for it. The garrison state needs the war. The war needs the garrison state. It is a closed loop of shared delusion, and the Russian people are trapped inside it.
In this new world, Europe faces a choice. It is the most important choice the continent has faced since 1945.
The American security guarantee is gone, and it is not coming back. This is not a temporary tantrum or negotiating tactic. Nor is it a phase that will pass with the next election cycle. It is a permanent geopolitical reality, as fixed as the geography of the continent itself. The fact is that Europe is on its own. But facts, unlike fantasies, can be the basis for action. Europe has the economic power, the industrial capacity, and the population to defend itself and to defend Ukraine. What it has lacked, until now, is the political will. The question of the next decade is whether that will can be summoned before it is too late.
Ukraine is the front line not just of territory, but of meaning. The soldiers in the trenches of the Donbas, the medics in the field hospitals, the grandmothers weaving camouflage nets by candlelight — they are the living shield of European civilisation. Every day they hold back the tide of barbarism is another day that the rest of Europe gets to send its children to school, to argue about tax policy, to take for granted the thousand small freedoms that peace provides. To fail to give them every weapon, every bullet, every euro they need to win is not just a moral failure but strategic suicide.
And so, the question comes down to this. Is “Western civilisation” a real, living thing, a set of values worth defending, a tradition of liberty and law and human dignity that is worth the sacrifice of comfort and profit? Or is it just a brand, a hollow slogan for a trading bloc that has lost the will to defend itself?
Ukraine has answered that question. It has answered it with four years of blood and courage. Now it is Europe’s turn. The alternative is a world where the lie wins, where the premise that Ukraine does not exist becomes the template for the erasure of other nations, other peoples, other realities. A world where borders are drawn by tanks, where values are nothing more than words, where might makes right and reality itself is negotiable. That is not a world any of us should be willing to accept.
The war on Ukraine is a war on reality. The defence of Ukraine is a defence of reality. And reality, in the end, is all we have. It is the ground beneath our feet; the principle that some things are true, that some things matter, that human beings have rights that cannot be taken away by force. Ukraine has defended that principle for four years. It is time for the rest of us to do the same.
This article is dedicated to the people of Ukraine: to the living and to the dead, to those who fight, to those who endure the darkness and refuse to let the light go out. Your sacrifice instructs us; your reality is our reality. Slava Ukraini.
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