Mounir Kilani
January 12, 2026
From Ukraine, we hear from the leaders, the experts, the commentators. From the people, we hear nothing. They are mobilized, displaced, bereaved, but never questioned. The war is recounted by those who are not fighting it and endured by those who have no say. This dissociation is not accidental. It allows a society under constraint to be transformed into a narrative of voluntarism, and a war without end into a moral obligation. As long as ordinary Ukrainians remain silent in the face of the pronouncements from above, the war can continue without having to justify itself.
“Where are the Ukrainian people?” The taboo question
When Ukraine is mentioned in Western media, one name comes up relentlessly: Zelensky. Around him gravitate ministers, generals, certified experts, Atlanticist diplomats, and TV pundits. A gallery of interchangeable faces, a well-oiled ritual, repeated ad nauseam.
But a crucial question, almost indecent in its simplicity, remains carefully avoided: where are the Ukrainian people?
Those who are dying. Those who are fleeing. Those who are hunted down for conscription. Those who shiver in the darkness for lack of electricity, who forgo hot water, and whose horizons shrink to the cellar or the queue for a crust of bread. Those who survive in disfigured cities, in countryside emptied of its men, in a daily anguish that has become commonplace. Those whose lives, grief, and fear have been reduced to mere variables in strategic calculations.
This people does not exist in the dominant narrative. They are absent, erased, neutralized. As if the war could be recounted—and prolonged—without those who suffer it. As if a weather report could describe a storm without ever mentioning the uprooted trees.
A war recounted without those who live it.
From the beginning of the conflict, Ukraine has been presented as a moral abstraction. A symbol. A banner. An ideological totem.
“We must help Ukraine,” Western leaders, security experts, and embedded journalists repeat in unison. But which Ukraine are they talking about?
Certainly not the Ukraine of working-class neighborhoods, outlying villages, or regions far from the cameras. Certainly not the Ukraine of grieving families, men hiding to avoid conscription, women left alone, and abandoned elderly people. Certainly not the Ukraine that is no longer a country, but an open-air construction site where lives are recycled into resistance, and suffering into an argument.
By dint of being repeated without contradiction, this moral injunction has ceased to be information and has become a position. And like any position, it carries a commitment. Because relentlessly calling for people to "hold on," to "not give in," to "go all the way," is never a neutral gesture when applied to a population that has neither a platform nor the possibility of withdrawing from the process. It is a life sentence pronounced in a comfortable foreign courtroom.
Where are the in-depth reports on:
the mobilization roundups in the streets and on public transport, which have become routine manhunts,
the arbitrary checks and expedited medical examinations that transform health certificates into deferred death sentences,
the thousands of people fleeing abroad, this silent exodus that is bleeding the country dry,
the moral exhaustion of a country bled dry?
They don't exist. Not for lack of access, but because reality contradicts the narrative. Because showing the machine that grinds up lives might raise questions about those who supply the fuel.
Official Ukraine versus the real Ukraine
Today, there are two Ukraines.
The first is official. Institutional. Media-driven. The Ukraine of press conferences, international summits, martial speeches, and promises of a "final victory" that is always postponed.
The second is real. Social. Human. The voice of men mobilized against their will, who speak not of victory but of survival. The voice of civil servants, teachers, and police officers, compelled to display public loyalty under threat of administrative sanctions, suspicion, or exclusion. The voice of a society under martial law, where silence has become a strategy of protection. The voice where hope has been replaced by resignation, and patriotism by the instinct for self-preservation.
Between these two Ukraines, there is not only a social divide. There is a fundamental asymmetry: those who speak of the war do not die in it, and those who die in it no longer have the right to speak. A perfect dissociation: the voice on one side, the flesh on the other.
This Ukraine has no spokesperson. It is neither invited onto television programs nor consulted in decision-making. It exists only as a pretext. It is the fuel that keeps the flame of a cause burning, without ever looking at what is being consumed.
An active minority, a silenced majority
Analyses based on internal observations of the country—not official polls, but social reality—paint a radically different picture from the Western version.
According to these interpretations, the hard core in favor of the indefinite continuation of the war does not extend beyond a numerically limited minority, concentrated in:
certain military-administrative segments, whose power and budget increase with each announcement of an offensive,
ideologically driven or nationalist networks,
structures whose very existence depends on the continuation of the conflict. For them, peace would mean mass layoffs.
In the army, the majority of soldiers yearn for a swift end, not an escalation. In civil society, the professed support often stems less from conviction than from fear. Because fear has become the main driver of the "consensus":
fear of losing one's job,
fear of being denounced,
fear of being accused of defeatism or treason,
fear of punitive mobilization.
A fear as thick as air, omnipresent and intangible, suffocating any desire for free speech.
The war no longer rests on popular support, but on a system of constraints. And this system is all the more effective because it is validated, externally, by a media narrative that transforms constraint into voluntarism and fear into patriotism. It manufactures consent through coercion, and we are sold it as a sovereign choice.
Polls: a political charade
To mask this reality, polls—particularly Western ones—are regularly brandished, supposedly proving that “Ukrainians want to continue the war.”
But these surveys are deeply biased. Can we seriously speak of “free opinion” in a country:
under martial law,
without elections,
with banned parties,
with closed media,
and criticism equated with a security threat?
In such an ecosystem, public opinion is not gathered, it is manufactured. Like a factory part produced according to specifications.
Polls conducted in this context do not measure popular will. They produce a narrative. Their function is not to inform Ukrainians, but to reassure Western public opinion, to justify continued military and financial aid, to maintain the illusion of massive and enthusiastic support.
The poll thus becomes a weapon of information warfare, a tool of external legitimation, disconnected from the lived experience of the country. An instrument that allows the war to be prolonged without ever having to bear its true human cost. It is statistical anesthesia. The Western conscience is lulled to sleep with percentages, while thousands of people elsewhere become definitive numbers.
A suspended democracy, a captive people
Elections are postponed indefinitely. The opposition is neutralized. Dissenting figures are marginalized, persecuted, or forced into exile. Major decisions are made outside the democratic framework.
And yet, we continue to speak in the name of the “Ukrainian people.”
But how can a people consent when they no longer have the option to refuse? Their “yes” is merely the obligatory echo of their inability to say “no.” It is the silence of the hostages that is interpreted as consent.
Contemporary Ukraine is not consulted: it is mobilized, instrumentalized, consumed. It has gone from being a political subject to sacrificial raw material.
War as a Human Proxy
Ultimately, this conflict is not just a territorial war. It is a proxy war, where the Ukrainian people serve as a strategic human resource. Mobilizable, expendable, replaceable flesh. A variable to be adjusted in a geopolitical confrontation that transcends them. An entire generation is treated as a stockpile—the “Ukrainian stockpile”—to be managed, replenished, and expended according to the needs of the front.
The Ukrainian elite negotiates, makes promises, speaks to the world. The Ukrainian people bury their dead, flee, and remain silent.
Prolonging a war without a credible political horizon, without any prospect of an end, without genuine popular consultation, is no longer a strategy: it is the normalization of mass death. And those who call for this permanent prolongation, while being shielded from its consequences, cannot forever hide behind the fiction of neutrality. They are the architects of a sacrifice whose blood they will never smell.
The Scandal of Silence
The invisibility of the Ukrainian people is not a journalistic oversight. It is a political necessity.
Because acknowledging the weariness, the doubt, the growing rejection of the war would force us to ask the only question that truly matters: in whose name does this war continue? Certainly not in the name of those who pay for it with their lives.
The mechanical repetition of a narrative, the systematic exclusion of dissenting voices, the refusal to investigate the real human cost are not errors or laziness. They are editorial choices. And every choice in a war has material effects. These are choices that, from afar, pull the lever of mobilization, lock the exit doors, and sign anonymous death warrants.
The Ukrainian people are the first victims of the conflict, but also the first to be censored. As long as they remain absent from the narrative, the war can continue, fueled by a fantasized Ukraine, emptied of its real inhabitants.
And perhaps this is the most profound crime: having transformed a living people into a propaganda tool, and their silence into permission to die in their place. Having constructed a trap where their very existence has become proof of the necessity of their destruction. The cycle is complete, implacable and chilling.
If the Ukrainian people were truly consulted, listened to, and free to speak, they would not be so systematically absent from the narrative produced in their name. Their absence is the ultimate proof of their subjugation. Only those whose words could bring the edifice crashing down are silenced.
Note: Several international NGOs and Ukrainian media outlets have documented the abuses linked to forced mobilization and martial law. These elements, rarely reported in Western media, confirm the existence of profound social fatigue, despite the polls widely promoted by the Kyiv regime and its supporters.
Source: https://reseauinternational.net/paroles-den-haut-silence-den-bas-la-double-ukraine-2/
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