Flanders Fields

• Coverage over the past winter months, for example, has focused on how Ukrainians are fighting in WWI-like muddy trenches in Bakhmut, while Russia suffers almost WWI levels of casualties.
• Many of the WWI comparisons stress the unmodern nature of what is happening on Ukraine’s battlefields.
• And, most importantly, by making these kinds of historical comparisons, we detach ourselves from the war’s horrors and violence.

Unmodern and modern war

• In these comparisons, WWI does not serve as the benchmark of modern war, but as the haunted image of primitive industrial warfare from more than a century ago.
• What’s so characteristic of WWI, and seems so unmodern, is its lack of progress.
• And while we have seen drones and other hi-tech tools of war on the news, we haven´t seen much progress on pushing back the frontline.

Underestimating Russia’s objectives

• The unmodern is, of course, closely associated not just with the war in general, but especially with Russia’s conduct.
• But by tying Russia’s conduct to a stereotypical image of WWI fighting, we might stop analysing the full context.
• One might also lose sight of the toll the current fight might be taking on the “more modern” Ukraine’s forces.
• Is it a war against Ukraine, or a war against the west that happens to be fought in and over Ukraine?

Disengaging from reality

• But that is a dangerous and misleading thought, as it isolates what is happening in Ukraine from our own times.
• What we see in Ukraine is not a historical horror show, it is the ugly face of full-scale modern war.
• Over the past decades, western society has become strangely unaware of what happens in a modern war.