How Can We Prevent a Metastasis of Fear?

A Tourniquet of Mythmaking

At the beginning of the full-scale invasion we subsisted on pure adrenaline, on exhilaration and⎯as strange as it may sound today⎯on ridicule. We lived in a world of spontaneously assembled jokes and songs, of captured conversations between inept and befuddled Russians who stole toilets, of stories about how Ukrainian soldiers on Zmiiv Island casually told the enemy to go fuck itself, about how a woman in southern Ukraine advised an occupier to place seeds in his pocket so that something useful would eventually grow out of him after his death, about how an old man in northern Ukraine walked right up to an enemy soldier and, recording him on video, made him say the Ukrainian word palianytsia¹Palianytsia, a native Ukrainian word for a style of country bread, gained international recognition as Ukrainian shibboleth. Due to phonetic differences, Russians struggle to properly pronounce the word. , and about the “paratrooper” who, after he was captured by civilians near Kyiv, admitted: “I am a degenerate from the Zhytomyr region.”

This grotesque picture of the enemy instantly desacralized “the world’s second greatest army,” transforming what seemed to be existential angst into a farce. “The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter,” Hannah Arendt³Hannah Ardent (1906-1975) was a German-American political theorist, historian, lecturer and author of works focusing on totalitarianism, including On Violence (1970). wrote in her work On Violence.

Transforming the occupants into “chmon.”⁵A Ukrainian slang term chmon meaining something akin to “boors” or “dolts”.Ukrainian society intuitively struck at the empire’s weakest spot⎯it dismantled our fear of the empire, and consequently, its authority over our society.

Besides real videos, we lived in a world of legends about the Ghost of Kyiv, who single-handedly destroys dozens of airplanes (in time, the Air Force admitted that this was a collective representation of the pilots of the 40th Brigade), or about the Chornobyl Red Forest, where the occupants dug their own foxholes-graves (in time, it turned out that this was dreamed up by a certain Ukrainian informational center).

A most interesting text that describes a phenomenon of similar mythmaking is “Reflections of a Historian on the False News of the War.” After World War One, a direct participant⎯the French historian Marc Bloch⎯writes about fakes as being the necessities, or even the demands, of a time. The rumors, fabrications, and twisting of stories that circulated both on the front lines and behind them were born out of collective fears, preconceptions, as well as, possibly, hopes, and thus told a lot more about the war than basic confirmed facts. Wartime censorship, over-exhaustion, and constant danger eradicated the ability for critical thinking in people while folklore, mythmaking, and caricaturing were energized anew. For Bloch, this was an example of the appearance of the collective consciousness of a society that is undergoing a catastrophe. He called for the noting down and archiving of this fluid and fragile, and in many ways, uncomfortable, memory, hoping that there would no longer be wars that would require historians to do so. As it turned out, Ukraïner did this throughout 2022.

Thus, Ukrainian society hadn’t really invented any sort of unique instrument then. And although it seemed to us that our meme-creating and mythmaking was a phenomenon, what was, in fact, unique was our context and how we counteracted. One needs only to recall how the Kartvelebi (the Georgians) desacralized the Russians in their short-lived 2008 war: that legendary video of the Russian soldier with a gold fork, clearly stolen from a building in the Abkhazian part of Sakartvelo (Georgia), sticking out of his front pocket. That imperial “banality of evil” was obvious already back then, but most of the political forces and society in Ukraine did not grasp what was going on in the Caucasian country. Meanwhile, it was the Ukrainians who came up with the multilayered online joke called “The Fork, a Store of Liberated Items,” which included Kartvelian (Georgian) things that the Russians had plundered: those very same toilets that would later be stolen from Ukraine, Hummer jeeps, and bicycles. At the bottom of a list of the store’s objects, a statement announced that in the coming season a Kyiv Cake was expected to be added to the collection.

And we also lived in a world of appeals made by the Ukrainian president, who had become a hero and an example of resistance for a great majority of society. This gave the Commander-in-Chief the opportunity to take on a familiar role of a leader loved by all; a role which, it seems, had been lost sometime between the election of 2019 and 2020 when “an average guy,” who had promised to make a peace deal, and said “Scram!” to the marauders, increasingly looked like a typical politician who had run into challenges that simply could not be surmounted with political slogans or “offices of simple solutions.” In this metamorphosis, he turned out to be an exceptionally experienced master in the management of impressions. At a critical time, when the whole world was expecting the capital to fall, it was the ability to “command the stage” and to broadcast openness and resistance that became weapons that were more effective than diplomatic protocols.

All of these things were in play, and we will probably never fully understand how much this actually saved us. But we do know that the Russians were counting on Shock and Awe, a doctrine of rapid dominance developed by the National Defense University of the United States in the 1990s. They were not only betting on military power. According to the doctrine they were to take control of the information space and rapidly work on creating total disorientation and paralysis.

Back then, in that moment of initial shock, this defense mechanism of the collective psyche (ridiculing, mythmaking, and heroization) was essential, like a tourniquet hurriedly applied while under fire. And in the fifth (or is it thirteenth?) year of the war, this metaphor is still scarily pertinent.

The information madness of that time had a short-term rescuing effect: it bought us some time and gave us the possibility, while riding adrenaline and a dopamine rush, to crawl to shelter while under attack. We laughed in order not to go insane from the intensity of events and heroized in order not to fall into despair. But when did that stage end, and did it? Or do we keep running, ignorant of the long distance ahead, continually falling down and getting up?

The Effect of Getting Stuck

The stories about the “chmon,” about the complete ineptitude of the Russians, about “Vanka-Stanka,”⁷A 2022 Ukrainian satirical war song that mocks Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine.are all part of a narrative that, by the end of the first year of the full-scale invasion (or maybe even the first quarter of it), went from being a requisite anesthetic to being a soothing sedative. From a dulling of shock-induced pain to a dangerous warping and dislodging of consciousness. Today’s reality has practically countered and eliminated that narrative, but its inertia continues to pull us back there. It is difficult to return to a military respect for an enemy when its image has been constructed entirely out of jokes and caricatures. This cognitive dissonance is becoming increasingly costly.

The truth, which is unpleasant to admit, is that the Russian army is a living, dangerous organism. It is capable of learning. In his reports, British military analyst Jack Watling, Senior Research Fellow for Applied Military Sciences at the Royal United Services Institute, consistently emphasizes: the Russians are not simply learning⎯ they are institutionalizing their experience. If, at the start of the war, they followed old handbooks and methods, today they are able to increase the scale of our innovations quicker than we do.

Yes, measured desacralization is still nonetheless necessary. Because the Russians continue to cast themselves as “the world’s second greatest army,” which they are not, and their threats to Europe often appear as bluffs. But behind these bluffs stand real iron, real training obtained at the Ukrainian front, and a real systematic killing machine. We can question their capacity to wage those future wars that will be necessary to keep their regime in power, but in actual wooded hideaways by Pokrovsk or Kupiansk this capacity is measured in the number of fiber-optic drones, the number of interceptors they use against our unmanned aerial vehicles, and in their ability to seemingly limitlessly employ aviation. And this vertical autocracy’s systemic nature grows in confidence as it utilizes people as fuel.

Even Valerii Zaluzhnyi, in his November 2023 programmatic essay for The Economist, admitted to having made a “mistake” in calculations. He believed that such a great number of deaths would have halted any country; but the Russian Empire is not just any country. For an empire, human resources are not of special value but are instead treated just like any consumable materials, such as fuel or ammunition. Meanwhile, we have recently returned to counting on the erroneous doctrine of wiping out their mobilization potential⎯this time with an even larger number of Russian casualties. But Russia continues to utilize this resource as if it were limitless while, for Ukrainian society, an increase in casualties transforms into an increase in sorrow and a decrease in the drive to resist.

The paradox lies in the fact that when the “anesthesia of deglorification through humor” effect had passed, what became normalized in our information space was not sober calculation but most likely paralyzing fear⎯that very same one that the Russians attempted to instill at the start of the invasion. In Sun Tzu’s ancient Chinese treatise The Art of War,⁹The Art of War is a 5th century BC military treatise generally attributed to the Chinese strategist and philosopher Sun Tzu (appox. 544–496 BC)one of the laws states: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”

Are we not continuing to be stuck in a stage where we still refuse to see the enemy as a true one? Isn’t it possible that its caricature, in contrast with harsh reality, has led to an emergence of disappointment and fear in us? The results are clearly visible in our mobilization potential, in which a whole additional layer of unresolved problems is hidden: people are afraid to go and fight an unknown yet mortally dangerous enemy, which for so long had been presented to them as being comical and incompetent.

Imperial Knowledge and Sacrificial Lambs

In autumn 2025, when I joined the ranks of the Forces of Defense, the phrase “no one will join the army voluntarily anymore” was the refrain heard in all possible corners of the training center, where hundreds of future soldiers had the fortune of undergoing basic military training. This phrase hung in the air, mixed in with the smell of cheap contraband cigarettes, saturating our foxholes and becoming as much a part of our everyday lives as our daily dawn revelry. It gradually became an axiom that you became tired of resisting even when you were witnessing the opposite.

The paradox here lies in the fact that, even at this stage of the war, a share of the cadets in the training platoons were actually volunteers. Yes, sometimes with various, often dubious, motivations: some fled from debt or family crises, and some were in search of themselves. While others joined absolutely willfully because “the time had come.” But the fact remains: we were convincing ourselves (not without the help of Russian propaganda) that volunteers no longer existed.

Russian propaganda works against us much more subtly than we are used to. It no longer needs to create complex ideological constructions about “Nazis.” It simply needs to sow doubt and disbelief, to nourish the spiral of silence: so that people who have an opinion that differs from the dominant one remain silent in order to avoid being isolated and, in doing so, transform an erroneous thought into a generally accepted one.

I finally realized the paths of influence that are taken by Russian propaganda not from books nor from interviews with Peter Pomerantsev¹¹Peter Pomerantsev is a British scholar who is Senior Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University and the author of two books about information and propaganda: Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (2014), This is Not Propaganda: New Adventures in the War Against Reality (2019).but from observing in-person how digital content is consumed at that very training center. Dozens of phones gazed at by my brothers-in-arms provided an opportunity to spy on their feed and on the logic of their choice of content, especially on TikTok. Thought-provoking and Ukrainian-language content is quickly flipped through while the most primitive Russian-language things, which appeal to emotions, draw interest. After a couple of days, the feed becomes filled not with news or direct propaganda but with craftily edited Soviet cartoons, quotes from 20th-century Russian comics, and predictions made by “great Russians” in the distant past. This elicits nostalgia for “the good old days,” which never really existed. Even for those who were born much later.

Additional reading

Peter Pomerantsev spoke with Ukraїner about how propaganda works in authoritarian and democratic societies, as well as how Russia uses it against Ukraine.

During the training, the volunteers, who found themselves mostly among those who had been forcibly mobilized, quickly began to feel marginalized. The line separating the former from the latter, though not absolute, was laid according to language and patterns of content consumption. We were outsiders surrounded by those who would get lost in those Russian informational snares that penetrated our foxholes in short streams of minute-long videos, popular quotes from Russian films, Russian jokes and idioms.

One time during maneuvers, my brother-in-arms and I were forced to resist a proposition to sing a song from the Soviet cartoon The Town Musicians of Bremen in unison with the others. It turned out that all that could be found in our collective memory was the Ukrainian anthem, but it was somewhat improper to sing it while sitting in the cab of a truck and not having the opportunity to stand up and hold your hand to your heart.

This would have been quite surrealistic: people in fatigues, who are preparing to kill the Russians that have invaded their land, are riding to a training ground while singing the melodies of those they are being trained to kill. But that is precisely what American literary scholar Ewa Thompson writes about in Imperial Knowledge. Russian culture was never just entertainment. It was always a means of making the presence of the empire “domestic,” comfortable and unalterable. The Town Musicians of Bremen, in this context, is not simply a song; it is a marker of loyalty that, although it perhaps may be partially curbed at this time, can sooner or later reappear. At the same time, naturally, it is the most active consumers of Russian-language content who are the ones most often asking themselves and others: “What are we fighting for?” or “Why us?”

People lose their self-control not so much because of the danger at the front lines, which most civilians really know little about, but because of the mythologized, hypertrophied image of the Territorial Center of Recruitment and Social Support (TCK). In the consciousness of many, this “internal enemy” has forced out the external one.

Then again, did we do enough to counter this propaganda and attempt to stay one step ahead of it? Did we manage to remove the tourniquet in time and hide it under a military pea coat so that it wouldn’t spoil anyone’s mood? Have we attempted to explain the importance of informational war to society? Have we formed at least some sort of mechanism for this war and included all willing social-political media in it? Or do we just continue to think of it in terms of “patriotic content”? Have we tried to make the mobilization process transparent and fair or, conversely, did we just plaster it with digitalization without changing any other aspects of it?

One particular incident at the training center provided an illustration of such widespread cognitive distortion. There was a young man in my platoon who, before he had been mobilized, had fled from the TCK nine times. Nine times! Though I had no proof that this was actually true, I went to bed at night with the thought that he would be gone when I awake, that he’ll escape given the first opportunity. But a miracle had taken place⎯the young man had passed all of his assessments better than almost anyone else. Perhaps because he finally found himself in a reality that had clear rules, comprehensible assignments, respectful treatment, and worthy training? Because he envisioned himself in that reality and the fear that had been imposed by anti-mobilization propaganda had subsided? He was given a weapon, developed skills, and became part of a collective⎯that is, he had regained his subjectivity, which he felt that he’d lost while escaping from “busification.”¹³Busification is a Ukrainian slang term that refers to compelled military mobilization. It stems from the use of minibuses for this purpose. Because it wasn’t so much the war itself that he feared as wartime lawlessness.

Another example was more alarming: before he had been mobilized, one of my brothers-in-arms had bragged about beating up a representative of the TCK.

“When I return, I’ll take my revenge against them,” this phrase, unfortunately, can often be heard in the smoking rooms of the training center when the subject of the TCK is brought up. But this threat contains within it a terrible trap for society. How do you imagine this will play out in the future?

Here we have a classic example of a scapegoat. Not a biblical one, but a mechanism as described by the philosopher René Girard: a society that cracks due to pressure and fear seeks an object for emotional release. You can’t get to Putin, and finding who is at fault in the cabinets of government authorities takes too long, but a uniformed person on the street⎯there they are, right in front of you. But how pleasant will it be for today’s recruits, when they themselves become veterans, to return to civilian life and realize that aggression towards a person in fatigues has become the norm? That attempts to beat up a soldier no longer elicit condemnation?

Or, even before having returned to civilian life, how will they feel when there is nobody left in the neighboring foxhole to cover their flank?

The Third Paradox

Justifying “busification” or being an advocate of the TCK system at this time is a thankless effort. Populist informational politics, which has failed to abandon the tactic of totally desacralizing an enemy⎯thus, suppressing one’s own ills⎯has transferred all of this negativity onto this structure due to an internal lack of political will.

Add to that the corruption in the method of mobilization, which has not yet been weeded out, and he has hit the jackpot in the shifting of fault from the external enemy to an internal one. And the final paradox in this text, one that people usually don’t want to talk about, is that we find ourselves living in a free country that has built its system of mobilization on compulsion without explanation and on fear without fairness.

On the other hand, our enemy⎯a dictatorship, the most-sanctioned country in the world⎯has allowed itself to build a model of mercenaries without compulsory mobilization and the closing of borders. Yes, has allowed itself, due to several factors: a low standard of living in the distant regions, the capability to pay these mercenaries large dislocation allowances, a larger population, and a different culture in which the value of life is much lower. Also, an expansion of microcredits and unaffordable mortgages has made the relatively sizable money provided by death gratuities an acceptable way out of financial burden.

At the beginning of the invasion, the Russians copied our strategies and tactics on the battlefield, our memes and songs, as well as our means of memorialization and heroization. But, unfortunately, at some point we began copying the Russians. And although our approaches to mobilization are fundamentally different, the approach to valuing life is nonetheless very similar.

Perhaps a change in approach to recruiting and in an attitude towards people will provide a chance for us to get out of a dead end. Perhaps we can still try to establish a new social contract in which fairness, transparency, and the value of human life have meaning. Perhaps we can still depend on institutions and build long-term communications instead of chaotic campaigns, as it is with mobilization. But isn’t it too late? Is there still a chance to return to mutual trust⎯with citizens trusting their state (which we often talk about being a historical trauma at various round tables) and the state trusting its citizens?

But it is here that the cruel reality of the war displays itself. Any form of mobilization reform now would take place while under a fierce, incessant informational attack by the enemy. And now, without a consolidated society that is ready to resist it.

We’ve all forgotten how women in Dagestan went to the streets attempting to halt Russian mobilization when it started. Many laughed, as if saying⎯oh, look, slaves are protesting. Others, those holding a more long-term perspective, understood: this is what awaits us very soon. And for two years now we have been at this point.

Among those who had been swayed by the propaganda and had become anti-TCK are countless true, freedom-loving people who have been masterfully manipulated.

We created a vacuum which was then occupied by the enemy (not without the help of The Town Musicians of Bremen).

In Threads, a new virtual forum for debate, someone recently compared mobilization with other historical unfreedoms of the Ukrainian people: “the Holodomor, Siberia, executions, concentration camps, serfdom”.

Similar comparisons are a diagnosis of our historical amnesia. We experienced the Holodomor, Siberia, Sandarmokh, and serfdom because, at a certain moment in history, we as a society could not keep up with the pace of unfolding events. We didn’t have sufficient time to accumulate enough subjectivity, a realization of what needs to be done, and an understanding of the enemy. At the elite level, we were late in comprehending the need for our own army; and at the level of society⎯the need for a new republic. We were late in realizing the need for mobilization.

Have each of us done enough so as not to once again lose such a historical opportunity? Are we at least thinking about how to once again renew mutual trust between the state and its citizens?