Ukraine: What Has Gone Wrong? Understanding the Decline of Participatory Warfare in 2022-2025 and Its Implications for Post-War Challenges

Ukraine's brave resistance to the illegal, unprovoked and genocidal full-scale Russian invasion since 2022 has fascinated the world. Particularly from the perspective of sociologists, scholars of media and war studies, it demonstrated the full potential of participatory warfare, based on active involvement of civilian populations through new digital and social media - also extremely relevant for countries that base their defence doctrines in the whole-of-society approach (such as Sweden, Finland, and the Baltic states). However, in the fourth year of a full-scale conventional interstate war, Ukraine's resistance is undermined not only through lukewarm support from its most powerful allies but also by a range of its domestic problems, from manpower shortages to rising inner conflicts. Using my newly coined concept of participatory attrition, I highlight the main challenges to Ukraine's participative war - and use it to highlight future challenges to the hypothetical post-war society (no matter how distant peace may seem right now). These lessons also serve as a stark warning to Sweden and its neighbours.

Roman Horbyk is Lecturer at the Slavic Department at the Univeristy of Zürich since 2024. Previously, he worked as postdoctoral researcher at Södertörn University and Umeå University after defending two dissertations, on illustrated press in the 1920s Weimar Republic and Soviet Ukraine (Kyiv National Taras Shevchenko University, 2015) and on media power in representations of Europe in Ukraine, Russia and Poland during Euromaidan (Södertörn University, 2017). Recent notable contributions by Dr Horbyk include works on fake news and viral disinformation as a genre, the history and techniques of Soviet and Russian propaganda and disinformation, public diplomacy and nation branding during the Russo-Ukrainian War, and military communication. One of his most important projects focused on the use of mobile phones by Ukrainian soldiers and civilians in war