living with – As Russia’s full-scale invasion grinds into its fourth year, Ukrainian writers and analysts are pushing the same uncomfortable idea: the question isn’t when the war ends, but how society lives with it—and what kind of future it builds while the fighting contin
About a week before the fourth anniversary of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Natalya Gumenyuk sat down to publish a guest essay in the New York Times titled “When Will This War End?. The Question Is Meaningless.” She shared the link on her Facebook page. still believing the words held weight even after the essay’s publication was delayed by more than six months.
The delay, she suggested, was part of the world’s pattern of looking for an exit ramp. “I wrote it after Alaska, but the editors kept thinking something would happen. Maybe in Riyadh, maybe in Florida…”
In her essay. Gumenyuk described a chill mismatch between two kinds of attention: the war treated like a film—something the world watches until focus fades—versus the lived fact of it for Ukrainians. “It can seem that the world watches Russia’s war on Ukraine as if it were a film. When attention wanes, there is a demand for an ending – if not good, then bad. For Ukrainians, this is not cinema but reality. It will last as long as it lasts.”.
That insistence doesn’t just quarrel with timing. It argues for a different kind of agenda. Gumenyuk points to what matters most: not when the war ends, but how. She does it with a single voice from near the frontlines, quoting a crane operator from a pipe plant near Zaporizhzhia: “how.”
After four years of full-scale invasion—and twelve years of war—she sees Ukrainian society reaching a turning point. The war, she writes, is no longer something people can afford to postpone their lives for. Ukrainian daily life now moves around the war and through it. “as long as it lasts.” The shift is subtle until you feel it: once you stop postponing everything. you’re forced to reorganize what “normal” even means.
Serhiy Zhadan. a writer and. since 2024. a sergeant in the Ukrainian National Guard. gave another side of the same reality in February 2026 at the Munich Security Conference. with a speech titled “Ten Theses about the Future.” His warning landed like a doorway that won’t fully close. “We must be prepared for this. When it ends, the war usually does not end. It is very important to understand that we will have to deal with its ghosts and shadows for a very long time.”.
In Zhadan’s future, the war isn’t a pause on the timeline that can be erased. It becomes written into memory. trauma. and a “shattered and. hopefully. rebuilt world order.” He does not describe it as a deferred past. Instead. he frames it as a new unnatural course of events—where “the future will consist of us—who we are. what remains of us. what we will be able to become”.
He then pulls the argument across borders. “This war. the first major war of the twenty-first century. has shown that the world is too connected by its past not to build a future based on shared security and trust. And that today. helping victims of armed aggression is not doing them a favor but building a shared space of normality and reciprocity. No matter how much some people might wish otherwise. a fire on a ship affects all passengers. regardless of the ticket class.”.
That’s where the tension sharpens. Bringing “ghosts and shadows” into the future—legalizing them, sharing them—sounds either brave or despairing depending on where you stand. But Zhadan frames it as an anti-delusion step, the kind you take when avoidance stops working.
For many readers. the most radical voice comes from Olena Styazhkina. a historian and writer who wrote an essay aimed at Ukrainian readers. Her background makes the words more than commentary. A former history professor at Donetsk National University. she was temporarily displaced after the occupation of the east of Ukraine in 2014. and the university was displaced as well—meaning she lost home. possibly forever.
From that long view. Styazhkina insists on “the positive normalization of it.” She draws a line between accepting the war and planning with it. “Normalization does not mean accepting the war as a good thing. but rather incorporating it into strategic thinking and management models. War becomes a factor that is taken into account in planning, just like climate risks, the labor market, or demographics.”.
She also calls the ongoing war “routinization,” and says it has already happened in daily routines: millions of people wake up after another Russian aerial strike, sometimes with little heating or electricity, then go to work, to school, shopping, and even theatres and bars.
Her wartime joke compresses the entire moral weight of that normality into something grimly practical: “I don’t care what it is – bombing, blackout, alien invasion, comet, meteorite, water shortage. I just need it to be on time.”
Styazhkina’s core claim is that incorporating the war into long-term thinking makes the question of the war’s end obsolete. No matter whether it ends soon, later, or never in a clean, comprehensible way, she argues it has already changed society and its self-image and future.
And if the war becomes a continuum. then the present stops being only “an unfortunate pause between the past and the future.” It turns into an ongoing flow of loss and mutual support. physical and symbolic coping. turning experience into knowledge. and shared responsibility and accountability—“the new abnormal.”.
Once the war is no longer treated as exception, it starts reshaping Europe’s agenda-setting. The text argues that “war fatigue” can’t be treated as the endpoint, and neither can climate change. Whether people acknowledge it or not, the war continues affecting lives now and future generations.
That shift changes the meaning of peace. security. stability and militarization once war becomes a “planning horizon” rather than a wished-for departure. It also forces uncomfortable questions into public life: how to strive for peace while preparing for war at an international European level; how to build a pan-European security architecture that includes Ukraine or makes it its cornerstone; how to develop and support an active and inclusive army while countering patriarchal and authoritarian encroachments; how to bring national and international security concerns to each citizen rather than leaving them to only a few; and how to deal with war that inevitably affects climate change.
For Ukraine, the new abnormal also demands a different language. A conversation among several colleagues and the writer described perceptions and reflections “stuck in 2023”—when the first shock of the invasion had passed and confidence in a quick counteroffensive still felt possible.
Voices arguing for normalization, in this telling, also argue for arriving in 2026, where the war stops looking like an aberration and becomes a strategic challenge requiring careful, adaptive long-term planning. Along with that shift comes a redefinition of the public good and the social contract.
In the first months and years after the full-scale invasion. cancelling. postponing. or silencing everything not tied directly to defence was described as “the only possible survival mode.” Four full years into the “big war. ” the piece says these approaches no longer help. Bogdan Logvynenko—described as a journalist. writer. and for several months a member of the Armed Forces of Ukraine—compared that inertia to a tourniquet: used correctly. it stops bleeding and saves lives; left for longer than necessary. it becomes deadly.
Across time. the relationship between silence and security has changed. as have relations between society and legislative and governmental bodies—“the state. ” as it is called in Ukraine. The text says it remains crucial to recognize that war sets priorities and limits certain rights and freedoms. but now there is also a need to review new rules and limitations against reality. with insistence on transparency and accountability. A “more open public discussion” about evaluating actual needs and the temporary character of certain limitations is described as long overdue.
The war as new normality, the argument continues, demands a wider acceptance of responsibility. Artur Dron’. a young writer who voluntarily joined the Armed Forces in 2022. writes in his last book Hemingway Knows Nothing: “If these years of service had been divided between two or three people. everyone could have stayed alive. everyone could have spent time with their families. and everyone could have protected their loved ones.”.
That line is used to show how responsibility can’t be left to a few. It also feeds a broader claim about the army’s role and its bond with society: the army must become an institution with the fairest. most transparent. and most supportive set of rules and procedures. focused on people who protect people.
In Ukraine, the text cites polls from December 2025 saying 92% of people trust the Armed Forces. It argues that when society shares responsibility for protecting and supporting itself and others. the army is no longer the frightening “other. ” but part of “us”—a social service and the new social contract to protect peace.
Underneath all these literary and political arguments sits a single insistence that pulls the door shut on denial. The piece returns to one question that can’t be avoided: normalizing the war must mean naming who waged it. It says discussions or criticism about the steps. methods. decisions. and solutions of the war cannot happen without clearly naming its causes. reasons. and ultimately the perpetrator. In that framing, normalization is learning lessons where “everything and anything is possible, even if unlikely.”.
Ukraine, the text concludes, did not choose this war either twelve or four years ago. It has to fight it and accept the new abnormal to stop it from becoming a global norm and setting the international agenda. If there is any meaningful question about the end of the war. it is not when. but how—on Ukrainian terms. with shared ghosts and responsibilities.
Natalya Gumenyuk New York Times Serhiy Zhadan Munich Security Conference Olena Styazhkina Donetsk National University war normalization Ukrainian literature cultural identity European security militarization social contract