Media Theater, Proxy Conflict, and the Death of Continuity.
The Proxy War Nobody Wants to Name
For years now, politicians and media institutions on all sides have carefully avoided one blunt word to describe what is happening on the steppes of Russia: war.
Instead, the public has been fed a carefully softened vocabulary of “conflict,” “security architecture,” “rules-based response,” and “strategic escalation management.” Yet after hundreds of billions spent, infrastructure sabotage, drone strikes deep inside sovereign territory, NATO intelligence involvement, sanctions warfare, industrial mobilization, and continual escalation rhetoric from all sides, pretending the carnage between Ukraine and Russia remains some isolated regional misunderstanding has become increasingly absurd.
This is war. It’s war with a capital W.
More specifically, it increasingly resembles a grinding proxy war between NATO and Russia fought on Ukrainian soil while narrated through mutually hostile propaganda systems. That observation does not sanctify Moscow. It does not erase Ukrainian suffering, nor does it magically transform NATO into comic-book villains. It merely acknowledges reality honestly, which is something modern media institutions increasingly struggle to do.
The modern information environment demands emotional certainty at all times. Every development must instantly become a morality tale. Every strike is either heroic resistance or barbaric escalation. And as we’ve seen, Western mainstream channels constantly signal how barbarous the Russians are. In this atmosphere of cinema, every military maneuver must be interpreted through a framework of virtue and pathology before facts have even settled. The public is no longer merely informed about war. It is emotionally managed through it.
This may partly explain why audiences increasingly distrust the very institutions still insisting they are guardians of objective reality. People sense when language is no longer functioning descriptively. They may not articulate it academically, but they recognize tone, framing, emotional pressure, and synchronized narratives almost instinctively. After enough years of headlines engineered for outrage, readers stop hearing information and begin hearing formatting. I believe most of the world is ready for President Putin to step up to the podium and declare the inevitable. The world is ready for Russia to end this war, but first, its naming seems to be an absolute step. The greatest statesman of the modern age has somehow allowed the public relations team too much leeway. This is my opinion as a former PR executive.
Journalism as Emotional Choreography
Let’s look at media, which is the most important arm of public relations. Somewhere along the way, journalism (and the powers standing behind it) stopped merely describing wars and began emotionally stage-directing them.
Take a recent Guardian headline describing a Russian strike on Kyiv as a “deranged” attack. The wording itself is revealing. Not because Russia is incapable of brutality in war, but because the headline quietly instructs readers how they are expected to feel before they even reach the second paragraph. Ukrainian strikes deep inside Russian territory are often framed as bold, daring, strategic, or necessary. Russian retaliation, however destructive or predictable within the logic of war, becomes irrational, psychotic, imperial, or deranged.
This asymmetry is not accidental. It emerges naturally from a Western media ecosystem shaped by NATO-aligned assumptions, Brussels policy culture, transnational institutional networks, elite fellowship systems, and emotionally synchronized newsroom incentives. That does not mean journalists wake up every morning taking orders from a volcano lair beneath Davos. It means worldview formation exists, and elite institutional cultures reproduce themselves remarkably well. And this is not only a media disease, but it’s a metastasis of an overall system from academia to the popular podcast.
Journalists, like everyone else, absorb the assumptions of the worlds they inhabit. A Brussels-centered media environment populated by think tanks, policy conferences, fellowships, NGO culture, and transnational governance institutions will inevitably produce a recognizable moral and linguistic framework. Over time, the framing becomes almost automatic. Russia is irrational aggression. NATO is defensive necessity. Escalation by one side becomes strategy; escalation by the other becomes pathology.
The truly fascinating part is that most participants in these systems likely believe themselves to be entirely objective. Modern institutional culture does not usually require overt conspiracy to produce synchronized narratives. Shared education, social incentives, professional advancement, prestige networks, and ideological clustering are often enough. Human beings are tribal creatures long before they are rational ones, and elite institutions are no exception.
The Death of Continuity
For many, the deeper story here is not merely war itself, but the death of continuity. A civilization permanently trapped in emotional escalation eventually loses the ability to distinguish reporting from theater, information from stimulation, and reality from narrative packaging. Citizens become psychologically exhausted, morally fragmented, and trapped inside competing systems of outrage that increasingly resemble entertainment products more than coherent civic discourse.
This fragmentation extends far beyond geopolitics. It infects culture, identity, institutions, relationships, and even memory itself. Modern societies increasingly experience reality through discontinuous bursts of stimulation rather than sustained narrative coherence. Every crisis becomes “historic.” Every election becomes “the most important in history.” Every conflict becomes existential. Eventually language itself begins collapsing under the weight of permanent emotional inflation.
This is why so many people increasingly long for things that still feel tangible and continuous: sacred landscapes, old films, family stories, handmade objects, remembered places, old dogs sleeping peacefully beside a desk. Such things feel psychologically trustworthy because they still possess continuity. They still belong to reality rather than narrative management. Meanwhile, churches burn, Slavs die on both sides, cities decay, and civilization slowly dissolves into content streams optimized for engagement metrics and ideological reinforcement.
One of the most dangerous illusions sustaining this war is the belief that endless managed escalation somehow represents the humane alternative. History rarely supports that assumption. Prolonged attritional conflicts have a tendency to consume entire generations slowly while political systems continue speaking in the antiseptic language of “containment,” “pressure,” and “strategic signaling.” Meanwhile, ordinary people experience something far older and more brutal: economic exhaustion, demographic collapse, psychological trauma, infrastructure destruction, and the gradual normalization of permanent war.
At some point, populations psychologically adapt themselves to existential conflict. On the Ukrainian side, images of older men being rounded up for trench mobilization increasingly communicate desperation and national exhaustion rather than confidence. On the Russian side, many citizens no longer perceive the conflict as a limited operation at all, but as a widening proxy confrontation with NATO itself. Whether Western policymakers accept that framing is secondary. Perception drives escalation as much as military reality does.
This is why many Russians who are neither extremists nor ideologues may nevertheless conclude that decisive resolution, however painful, is preferable to endless strategic bleeding. Not because they worship war, but because open-ended conflict eventually corrodes societies from within. A four-and-a-half-year “policing action” no longer feels psychologically or strategically coherent to many ordinary Russians living beside what increasingly resembles a permanent war frontier.
None of this makes war moral. Nothing can. It merely acknowledges a grim historical reality: once large industrial wars begin, prolonged indecision can become its own form of destruction. The longer wars drift without conclusion, the greater the pressure toward wider mobilization, harsher escalation, and more radical strategic logic. Perhaps this is the uncomfortable truth modern political and media systems struggle to admit publicly. Peace becomes harder, not easier, once societies fully reorganize themselves around permanent conflict.
Phil Butler is a policy investigator and analyst, a political scientist and expert on Eastern Europe, and an author of the recent bestseller “Putin’s Praetorians” and other books
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