How the war in Ukraine might change the state
Vladimir Putin repeatedly mentioned that the Ukrainian state should not exist. In his February 21, 2022, address, he explained that Ukraine had no stable statehood, that it stood on shaky foundations and that Russia had built it anyway, and was entitled to taking it all back.1 The destruction of the Ukrainian state is a long-standing goal for Putin, in part because its very existence demonstrates to Russians that a post-Soviet state need not be a totalitarian dictatorship.
Even if not all Ukrainians fight to defend the state as it is, the war is, in large part, a war about statehood, were it only because the destruction of Ukrainian statehood is a Russian war aim.
On the one hand, Russia is the archetype of the mafia state where institutions such as parliaments, the judiciary or the media are entirely hollowed out and where power is regulated solely through interpersonal agreements. On the other hand, Ukraine stands in for a democratic state, where power flows through institutions, not people. While Ukraine was and is far from being a perfect democracy, there is little doubt that Ukrainians understand what is at stake and that the two state forms stand wide apart.
The war might decide what state form prevails.
That war influences how power is organized even in peace time is not a new idea. A state form, of course, results from the interplay of many factors. However, it is clear that the modern state emerged in the late 15th century in large part because royal houses had to raise taxes regularly to pay for standing armies (which replaced the temporary armies raised with one-off taxes previously). Later, and at the risk of over-simplifying, the idea of citizenship and nationalism also arose as a result of the massive, conscripted armies of the European wars of late 18th and early 19th century.2 Raising millions of men is easier if they believe they are fighting for something grander than the wishes of the powerful. (Again, this does not imply that coercion played no role in Napoleonic armies.) And the welfare state arose in the late 19th century as a solution to increase the fitness of soldiers, as did free public education to indoctrinate children seen as future fighters.
The war in Ukraine already provides insights on what state forms are most adapted to survive 21st-century warfare.
The mafia state could not win
The war’s first lesson is that the mafia state could not win. I don’t mean that Russia did not win, but that Putin had to dramatically transform state institutions to avoid being ousted.
In 2022 and early 2023, the Russian force rested in large parts on mercenaries. The most powerful of them, Yevgeny Prigozhin, chief of the Wagner group, decided in June 2023 that it might be more advantageous for him to take on his master – Putin – rather than to fight the Ukrainians. Why he did not carry out his rebellion until the end will forever remain a mystery. However, his actions showed that it was impossible to wage a war without the one institution that allows a state to use force against another: an army.
This is not a recent discovery. Writing in the early 16th century, as modern states were emerging in Europe, Niccolò Machiavelli argued that auxiliaries and mercenaries were useless and dangerous. In a way, he foresaw the Wagner rebellion. “The mercenary captains are either capable men or they are not; if they are, you cannot trust them, because they always aspire to their own greatness, either by oppressing you, who are their master, or others contrary to your intentions; but if the captain is not skilful, you are ruined in the usual way,” he wrote to the prince.3
Since then, Putin reorganized Russia’s army, integrated former Wagner fighters and had Yevgeny Prigozhin killed. The soldiers’ motivation, though, remains pecuniary. It is hard to see that Russian nationalism plays a role in combats. While the Russian regime does rely on ethnonationalism, it is used to direct hatred away from the ruling clique, not as a motivating factor for soldiers. Ethnographic surveys of Russian soldiers would deliver better insights; I only note that neither Russian soldiers nor civilians rushed to protect the state during the Wagner rebellion. Additionally, the extreme nationalist faction around Igor Girkin has been silenced and its leader sits in jail.4
Nationalism plays much less of a role in the war in Ukraine than it did in the 19th and 20th century, but that need not be a major issue. Both sides have trouble finding enough personnel but that lack of manpower has yet to translate into catastrophic failure on the battlefield. Massive concentrations of men do not decide on the outcome of the war, even if Russian “meat assaults” succeeded in weakening Ukrainian positions. On the contrary, the “transparent” battlefield, where drones and satellite imagery make it easy to identify any concentration of force, favours small units.
Volunteer soldiers with no emotional stake in the war seem to fight well enough for Russia to keep advancing, however slowly. The shape of Russia’s army, a hodgepodge of professionals, volunteers, conscripts and mercenaries, resembles in a way the colonial armies of the 19th century. When the French government invaded Madagascar to destroy its state in 1895 for example, half of the infantry were from France proper, the rest came from other parts of the empire.5
Warfare as seen in Ukraine, which does not require a levĂ©e en masse but does require large amounts of capital for materiel and electronic warfare, cannot be waged by a mafia state but is compatible with an empire. The French government between Napoleon and the 3rd Republic directed the vast majority of public expenditure towards the military,6 did not impose conscription and did wage many colonial wars. While Putin’s Russia is not Restoration France, the comparison shows that such a state form can be stable over several decades.
Even if Russia still lacks a key state institution – an order of succession – it need not push the country into chaos. Between 1824 and 1873, France also did not see a single peaceful transition of power.
Democratic institutions in war
Russia had to transform its (lack of) state institutions to be able to keep on fighting. Ukraine, in a way, did too. A a common misconception of democracy implies that the population should blindly trust nominally democratic institutions (under the slogans “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” or “safety is the first form of liberty”). In Ukraine, these institutions (the police, the presidency or the parliament) did not play a leading role.
On the contrary, the war in Ukraine showed that non-state organizations were key in supporting both the army and affected civilians. The vast majority of the population has either donated or participated in civil society organizations.7 According to data collected by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, trust in volunteers stood at 84% in December 2023, against 26% for the government (only the armed forces scored higher).8 More research would be needed, but it seems that non-state initiatives play a major role in drone production9 and care for the wounded10.
In other words, the strength of the democratic state in the current war is not located in its own institutions but in its ability to foster and sustain civil society. European politicians seem, in their vast majority, totally oblivious to this key lesson of the war.
Digitalization, war and state
The war in Ukraine showed the role of connectivity and microelectronics in warfare. Drones, satellite imagery and data analysis are now key components of both armies’ fighting capacity. This evolution demands large capital investment (a constellation of satellites for high-speed connectivity costs a few billion euros) and often involves dependency on foreigners, as Elon Musk demonstrated when he restricted Starlink availability to Ukrainian forces.
However, it is hard to see how digital weapons differs from those made of steel – at least when it comes to their influence on state institutions. Dependency on foreign capital and materiel is a major issue for most fighting states, from the USSR’s reliance on the Lend-Lease program in World War 2 to Iraq’s reliance on French Mirages in its 1980-1988 war with Iran.
The science-fiction idea of a digitized citizen (or subject) evolving in a new form of digital state is currently not being realized. On the contrary, the brittleness of digital institutions, or even gear, seems utterly unfit for actual war.
Hezbollah can testify to the impossibility to run a proto-state using off-the-shelf electronics to communicate (Israeli forces remotely detonated their pagers after a supply-chain attack). Norway and Sweden, which previously pushed for the digitization of the economy, are back-pedalling and now urge their citizens to keep cash at hand in case digital systems were compromised by Russian attackers.11
Both examples are far apart but show the need for state-level institutions that can verify electronic systems independently and that can rely on non-digital systems if need be.
The war in Ukraine is not over and European mobilization might still push Russia towards defeat. However, it is hard to see how European elites and the general population would do so. A stronger Chinese involvement in the war, or wars directly fought by the Chinese state, might also prove my analysis wrong.
Conversely, the United States is fast transforming into a mafia state on the Russian model and might soon fight its own colonial wars. Donald Trump repeatedly denied Canadian statehood since his re-election, calling the prime minister a “governor” and the country the “51st state”. The US mineral deal in Ukraine could also revive the imperial company as a state form, if a “West Ukraine Company” were to run US-occupied Ukraine on the model of the East India Company in the 18th century.
Cover photo: Queen Ranavalona III of Madagascar gives her last royal speech in 1895. UniversitĂ© de CĂ´te d’Azur.
Notes
1. CSPAN, Russian President Putin Statement on Ukraine, 21 Feb. 2022.
2. The process is not unidirectional and nationalism also played a role in provoking war. But the case of Prussia especially shows that the state did change as a result of new fighting techniques. The state that fought at Leipzig in 1813 was dramatically different from the one that fought at Jena/Auerstedt in 1806.
3. The Prince, translated by W. K. Marriott, p. 33.
4. Russia Upholds Prison Sentence for Nationalist Girkin, The Moscow Times, 29 May 2024.
5. The Madagascar Expedition of 1895–96. (1897). Royal United Services Institution. Journal, 41(232), 722–767. doi:10.1080/03071849709416037
6. Greenfield J. The Making of a Fiscal-Military State in Post-Revolutionary France. Cambridge University Press; 2022.
7. Kateryna Zarembo, Eric Martin; Civil society and sense of community in Ukraine: from dormancy to action. European Societies 2024; 26 (2): 203–229. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/14616696.2023.2185652
8. Civil Society in Ukraine in the Context of War Report on a Comprehensive Sociological Research, February 2024.
9. Ukraine Is Making FPV Drones Without Chinese Parts And At Lower Cost, Forbes, 8 April 2025.
10. Ukraine’s wartime recovery and the role of civil society, Chatham House, June 2024.
11. Sweden and Norway rethink cashless society plans over Russia security fears, The Guardian, 30 October 2024.