I was particularly struck by the depersonalization of war that the increasing integration of drone warfare implies. Drone technology, especially as AI rapidly advances, can completely abstract a human agent not only out of battle but also out of target deliberations, reducing opportunities for the human conscience to mitigate brutality. As the Reuters podcast noted, the U.S. mandates that a human being must be “in the loop” for any kinetic attack, but a lot of other nations don’t have similar restrictions – and I don’t think it’s outside the realm of possibility that the U.S. will liberalize its guardrails to keep up with geopolitical competitors. It seems that in some ways, because they are cheaper than missiles, drone warfare will level the global playing field, preventing the bifurcation of the world into the strong and the weak (and enabling future “Ukraines” to resist their conquest, as Ukraine has).  But it also seems like the greater chasm between those who foment conflict and those who suffer that drone warfare facilitates will increase civilian casualties and lead to a proliferation of refugee crises.

I was also shocked by how holistically Ukrainians have incorporated the war into their daily lives. As Deb’s Substack illuminates, it is astonishing how people will gamble on a few extra hours of sleep rather than race to a bomb shelter, but it also makes sense: we fundamentally need to preserve mundane experiences and any illusion of normalcy. Organizing every aspect of everyday life around the possibility of death probably feels like a form of capitulation. The New York Times article about the Ukrainian children’s books that address the war is another example of this integration of the war into life, rather than treating it as the geopolitical anomaly that it is. I wondered whether the desensitization to war that these children’s books may encourage paradoxically protects childrens’ sensitivity, or whether it may be counterproductive. For example, I was slightly disturbed by the anecdote about the mom who bought her 10-year-old son books about “fighter jets, missiles, drones, and fire arms” because it “helps him have hope.” The desire to safeguard your child’s childhood is the most human instinct there is, but I wondered whether these books play a role in the excessive militarization of a society, whether treating war as normal will ultimately reproduce cycles of violence.

I was intrigued by the Russian state’s relationship to religion, as presented in the documentary A Faith Under Siege. The narrator commented that Russia is a “self-described Christian nation targeting evangelicals in Ukraine”; the persecution of white Christians (a group that is far more often persecuting others) is an image with no modern parallel, and their ethnic and religious status doubtless contributed to the outsize global response to their suffering. I wondered whether the optimism and hope that religion nurtures is particularly threatening to Putin, especially because the barbaric arbitrariness of Russia’s drone strikes against civilian targets evinces a war strategy of demoralization and the crushing of the human spirit. Putin, however, is attempting to have it both ways with religion, mobilizing the Russian Orthodox Church as an instrument of power. The documentary notes that “in occupied Ukraine, Russia is trying to replace God with the Russian state.” Putin knows fidelity to faith jeopardizes fidelity to him, but he also is attracted to the possibilities of weaponizing a highly regimented, hierarchical religion.