When Society Becomes the Battlefield
Ukraine's Next War Is Fought Behind the Front
Ukraine may
be able to fight for another two years.
But what happens when the war increasingly targets the society that must
sustain the fight?
R.M. Westerink; September 2026
This piece does not continue “The Other War Over Ukraine” so much as react to what has changed since it was written [1]. That article asked whether Ukrainian air defense and manpower could hold for two more years. In the weeks since, a different question has become urgent: what happens to the society those defenses are meant to protect?
The short version: Russia is no longer only trying
to break Ukraine's ability to fight. It is testing whether Ukrainians can still
lead ordinary lives. That is a contest Europe cannot leave to weapons and
air-defense procurement alone.
A new phase of the war in Ukraine is becoming
visible. Russia has attacked civilian infrastructure throughout the full-scale
invasion, but the target system is widening and becoming more interconnected.
The latest warning comes from attacks on internet providers and data centers —
the same digital backbone that keeps banks, payment systems, businesses and
public services running [2]. At the same time, repeated strikes have damaged
logistics, ports, energy facilities and industrial production, including the closure
of Ukraine's largest steel plant after repeated attacks.
The
battlefield is no longer adequately described by the front. The systems that
allow the society behind the front to function are increasingly part of the
war.
From
Military Attrition to Societal Attrition
The significant change is not a tidy
chronological progression in Russian targeting. Energy, transport, industry and
civilian infrastructure have been attacked for years. What matters is the
growing breadth of the target system and the way failures in one system
propagate into others.
military
forces → energy → logistics → industrial capacity → digital infrastructure →
functioning society
Modern societies depend on networks of
networks. Electricity supports telecommunications.
Telecommunications support payments and government services. Data centres
support banking and administration. Transport depends on energy and digital
control. Industry depends on all of them. An attacker therefore does not have
to destroy a society physically to make ordinary life progressively harder. It
can repeatedly damage enough critical nodes to keep the society repairing
yesterday's losses rather than strengthening tomorrow's capacity.
This also creates an escalation dynamic.
Ukraine is increasingly able to strike Russian energy and industrial
infrastructure at long range: Russian refineries have suffered repeated
disruption, including the temporary shutdown of processing at the Moscow
refinery after a September drone attack [3, 4].
Russia, meanwhile, continues much larger attacks across Ukraine — and mutual
degradation does not mean symmetrical degradation. Russia has far greater
capacity to affect basic civilian functioning across Ukraine. Ukraine can
impose significant costs on Russia, particularly on energy production,
war-supporting industry and economic efficiency, without presently possessing a
comparable ability to make Russian society broadly unlivable.
Livability:
When Does Disruption Become Something More?
This suggests a useful concept for thinking
about the next two years of war: livability. It is not a mathematical index. It
is a way to ask whether a society can still support an ordinary civilian life
while absorbing sustained attack.
Livability
= essential services + physical safety + income + housing + mobility + social
support + expectation of recovery
The last component may be the most important.
Populations can endure extraordinary hardship while they believe it is
temporary. The dangerous transition occurs when repeated disruption changes
expectations — when families stop asking when normal life will return and start
deciding where else they should build their future.
Five groups of indicators therefore matter:
- physical security;
- reliability of electricity, heating, water, communications and healthcare;
- housing and employment;
- mobility and functioning social infrastructure such as schools and transport;
and
- expectations about recovery.
Geography changes how those indicators
translate into displacement.
Frontline communities may become unlivable primarily through physical danger.
Large inland cities can absorb much more damage because they possess
redundancy, repair capacity, hospitals, employment and functioning
administration. Western Ukraine remains an internal refuge for people leaving
more exposed regions. Beyond it lies the European Union, offering a large and
relatively accessible external safe zone. External displacement pressure can
therefore accelerate when internal refuge becomes overloaded or begins losing
its own livability advantage.
A Ladder
of Societal Deterioration
|
Stage |
Condition |
Societal response |
|
1 —
Disruption |
Outages,
shortages and attacks remain intermittent. |
Society
adapts. |
|
2 — Chronic disruption |
Failures recur; repair and workarounds become
normal life. |
Households and firms build redundancy. |
|
3 — Local
unlivability |
Particular
areas cannot reliably support civilian life. |
Internal
displacement rises. |
|
4 — Systemic degradation |
Several essential systems fail simultaneously
across substantial areas. |
Relocation becomes a broader household strategy. |
|
5 —
Expectation break |
People
cease expecting recovery within a tolerable horizon. |
External
migration can accelerate. |
|
6 — Demographic feedback |
Departure reduces workers, taxpayers, technicians
and economic activity. |
Recovery becomes harder, encouraging further
departure. |
These are qualitative stages, not a scored
index — a way to orient analysis, not to assign Ukraine a rank.
Ukraine already experiences different stages
in different places. The point is not to label the country as a whole
'unlivable.' It is to watch whether severe local and regional disruption
becomes broader, deeper and more persistent — and whether temporary
displacement increasingly becomes permanent relocation.
Ukraine:
Current Situation and Outlook
The earlier article asked whether Ukraine
could retain enough military, economic and societal capacity to continue the
war. The question now is what another two years of cumulative degradation might
do to the society that has to sustain that effort.
The 2025–26 winter demonstrated the
vulnerability.
UN human-rights monitors documented systematic and repeated Russian attacks on
energy infrastructure [3]. Emergency outages affected millions; at times
civilians had electricity for only a few hours a day. Heating was disrupted for
hundreds of thousands during temperatures below −20°C, while water supplies,
schools and healthcare were also affected. Some people left their homes because
of the outages.
The danger is not simply destruction. It is a
possible feedback loop:
infrastructure
degradation → economic disruption → displacement and emigration → smaller
workforce and tax base → weaker repair capacity → poorer services → further
departure
This would turn demographic loss into a
strategic effect. Skilled technicians, professionals, younger workers and
families are not merely population statistics. They are part of the capacity
that repairs infrastructure, sustains the economy, finances the state and
eventually rebuilds the country.
The
strategically important threshold may not be when Ukraine can no longer fight.
It may come earlier — when too many Ukrainians conclude that they can no longer
build ordinary lives inside Ukraine.
That is a risk to monitor, not a prediction.
Ukraine has repeatedly demonstrated substantial adaptive capacity. The question
is whether adaptation can continue to outrun cumulative damage.
Russia: A
Different Degradation Path
Russia is also increasingly exposed to
long-range Ukrainian attacks.
Drone strikes have reduced output at major refineries, created fuel-market
pressures and forced repairs at important facilities [5]. The economic cost of
the war is also visible in public finances, with Russia's government projecting
a larger 2026 budget deficit than originally planned [6].
Yet the Russian livability problem is
fundamentally different. Its enormous geography, deeper infrastructure base and
the distance of most major population centres from Ukraine provide substantial
physical redundancy. Damage to a refinery or electricity system in one region
does not make Moscow, Kazan or Siberian cities unlivable. Russia can absorb
substantial physical damage before national livability is threatened; Ukraine
has much less geographical and demographic margin.
Russia's nearer-term degradation pathway is
therefore more likely to run through economic cost, constrained opportunities,
selective infrastructure disruption, mobilization risk and political coercion
rather than widespread physical unlivability. These pressures can still
stimulate emigration, particularly among mobile, educated or internationally
oriented groups, but that resembles selective demographic and economic erosion
more than Ukraine's present displacement problem.
The Race
Between Destruction and Adaptation
Infrastructure warfare does not mechanically
produce societal collapse. Societies respond. Ukraine has spent years repairing
networks, decentralizing energy supply, using generators and alternative
communications, relocating businesses and drawing on European assistance. The
relevant contest is therefore not destruction alone.
Can
adaptation remain faster than degradation?
This reframes civilian support. A
transformer, distributed generator, protected data center, communications
backup, repaired railway or replacement industrial facility does more than
restore an economic asset. It increases the amount of damage required before
ordinary life stops functioning. Resilience is therefore not separate from
defense. It is one of the means by which a society denies an attacker the
strategic effect sought from infrastructure attacks.
What This
Means for Europe
Europe should prepare for four consequences.
First, protect the functioning society, not
only the battlefield.
Air defense
and scalable counter-drone systems matter not only for military formations and
major power plants, but increasingly for the distributed infrastructure on
which daily life depends.
Second, treat civilian resilience as defense
capability.
Energy
redundancy, telecommunications, data storage, transport, heating, hospitals,
housing and industrial repair should be understood as components of Ukraine's
strategic endurance, not merely as postwar reconstruction.
Third, watch displacement as a strategic
indicator.
The crucial
signal may not be the headline refugee total, but whether temporary
displacement is turning into permanent family relocation. An expectation break
could become visible in migration behavior before it is obvious in
conventional economic statistics.
Fourth, learn the lesson for Europe itself.
Ukraine is
demonstrating the vulnerability of highly networked societies. Europe's
electricity grids, cloud and data infrastructure, payment systems, telecoms,
ports, satellites and logistics networks create enormous efficiency. They also
create dependencies whose failure can propagate across society.
Another
Two Years Will Not Simply Be More of Today
The territorial front remains central to the
war. But prolonged conflict creates incentives to seek effects behind that
front: reducing industrial output, disrupting logistics, imposing repair costs
and weakening the society that sustains military resistance.
For Ukraine, this raises a question more
demanding than whether enough weapons and soldiers can be found.
Can the country preserve enough safety, employment, services and confidence in
recovery for millions of people to continue regarding Ukraine as the place
where their future lies?
For Russia, the pressure is different: how
much economic, industrial and social degradation can be absorbed before war
costs begin changing behavior more broadly?
And for Europe, the lesson reaches beyond
Ukraine. The defense of a modern society is increasingly the defense of the
interconnected systems that allow ordinary life to continue.
Another
two years of war should not simply be imagined as another two years of today's
battlefield. They could become two years of progressively discovering — and
attacking — the vulnerabilities of modern society itself.
References
1. R.M.
Westerink, “The Other War Over Ukraine — Can Ukraine Last for Two More Years?”
Europe Is Us, 8 September 2026.
https://europe-is-us.blogspot.com/2026/09/the-other-war-over-ukraine.html
2. The
Guardian, “Russia strikes at heart of Ukraine's digital economy with attacks on
ISPs and datacentres,” 26 September 2026.
3. UN Human
Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, “Attacks against Ukraine's energy
infrastructure and update on the human rights situation in Ukraine, 1 December
2025 – 31 May 2026,” 29 June 2026.
4. Reuters,
“Three dead in Moscow region, drones hit oil refinery in Russian capital,” 20
September 2026.
5. Reuters,
“Moscow oil refinery output halted after Sunday drone attack, sources say,” 21
September 2026; Reuters, “Half of Russia's top diesel-producing refineries cut
back output after drone strikes,” 15 September 2026.
6. Reuters,
“Russia will have budget deficit not exceeding 3% of GDP in 2026, Finance
Minister says,” 21 September 2026.
7. UN Human
Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, “Attacks on Ukraine's Energy
Infrastructure: Harm to the Civilian Population,” 18 September 2024.
