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It is the first conventional military conflict to take place in the age of social media and global cinematography (i.e., the omnipresence of cameras). It brought a veneer (but only a veneer) of immanence to war that, for millennia, had revealed itself only through the mediating forces of cable news, printed newspapers, and victory steles.

For the eternal optimist, the idea that a high-intensity war would be documented by thousands of first-person videos had positive sides. From the standpoint of intellectual curiosity (and martial prudence), the flood of images from Ukraine offers insight into new weapons systems and methods and provides a remarkable level of tactical data. Rather than waiting years of agonizing dissection of after-action reports to reconstruct engagements, we are informed in near real time of tactical movements.

Unfortunately, all the obvious downsides of broadcasting a war live on social media were also present. The war has instantly become sensationalized and saturated with fake, fabricated, or poorly captioned videos, cluttered with information that most people are simply not equipped to parse (for obvious reasons, the average citizen does not have much experience of the differentiation between two post-Soviet armies using similar equipment and speaking a similar, or even the same, language), and pseudo-expertise.

More abstractly, the war in Ukraine has been transformed into an American entertainment product, with celebrity wonder weapons (like the Holy Javelin and HIMARS), grotesque references to American pop culture, visits from American celebrities, and voices off of Luke Skywalker. This all fits very naturally into the American sensibility, because Americans love underdogs, and especially spirited underdogs who overcome extreme obstacles through perseverance and courage.

The problem with this favored narrative structure is that underdogs rarely win wars. Most major peer conflicts don't have the conventional Hollywood plot structure, with a dramatic twist and turn. Most of the time, wars are won by the more powerful state, that is, the one with the capacity to mobilize and effectively apply greater combat power over a longer period of time. This has certainly been the case in American history – although Americans may dearly wish to present themselves as a historical underdog, the United States has historically won its wars because it was an exceptionally powerful state with compelling and innate advantages. compared to their enemies. There is no need to be ashamed of it. As General George Patton said: Americans love winners.

This is how we arrived at a situation of convolution where, despite Russia's many obvious advantages (which ultimately boil down to a superior indigenous capacity for mobilization of men, industrial production and technology) , it became “propagandistic” to claim that Russia would achieve some kind of victory in Ukraine – that Ukraine would end the war having failed to regain its 1991 borders (the victory condition set out by Zelensky) and with the country in a state of wreckage, demographic emptying and material destruction.

We finally seem to have reached a denouement phase, where this view – allegedly an artifact of Kremlin influence, but in reality the most direct and obvious conclusion – becomes inescapable. Russia is a bigger fighter with a much bigger bat.

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