“The war after the war has already begun,” warned Ksana Nechyporenko, co-founder of GoGlobal, an organization that helps young Ukrainians acquire new skills for the 21st century.
Her concern is that when peace does come, the danger to Ukrainian nationhood will not end. Moscow will still retain powerful tools to disrupt and derail a wounded country’s path to a better future. The Kremlin will employ its full armory against Ukraine: everything from disinformation and cyberattacks to political manipulation and economic pressure.
For her, the danger is that Ukraine will emerge exhausted, drained, grieving from the war, and all too vulnerable to manipulation. She expects a vast effort to infiltrate Ukraine’s media and political space, amplifying every possible fracture.
Russia, she warned, is skilled at spotting a topic that can divide a country and then flooding the information space around it. She listed several flashpoints:
- Those who left the country versus those who stayed
- Soldiers versus civilians
- Russian speakers versus Ukrainian speakers
- Regions against regions
- Political parties vying for power
“You can see Russian footprints everywhere,” she said. “They spend billions sowing dissent.”
One example she gave during our conversation sounded almost trivial. Ukrainians were upset that this year’s mathematics exams were unusually difficult. Almost immediately, Nechyporenko said, the complaint was spun into something else, including false narratives about bringing foreigners into the country and replacing Ukrainians.
“I can see when an article is published,” she said. “Immediately, you see a flood of negative comments.” Suddenly, everyone is arguing with everyone.
For Nechyporenko, this is not random. “Russia has been doing information warfare since 2013,” she said. “We in Ukraine were their first experiment for this approach.”
One reason she worries that Ukraine will be vulnerable to Russian disinformation is that, after years of war, the country’s human capital is not what it once was. “People are having heart attacks as young as age 40, early menopause is increasingly common, and antidepressant use has risen dramatically.”
She also worries about what these years have done to students. First came COVID, with at least two years of social isolation. Then came the invasion, with schools closed, air raids, power outages, and long stretches of learning in shelters or online. “Children have lost six years of normal socialization,” she said, describing one of the war’s quieter but lasting injuries.
Nechyporenko then described a program in the Carpathian Mountains that brought together 160 children from front-line areas. For many of them, it was the first time in years they had been with so many other children at once.
“They didn’t know how to work in groups,” she said. “They’d ask, ‘Can I please do it alone?’ Working with others was too uncomfortable.” She added: “You can watch them sit beside each other and not talk. They never had the experience of interacting with other children.”
The academic losses are also consequential. Some children are two years behind in mathematics compared with Ukrainian children living abroad. “Many young people who spent long periods in shelters will take years to catch up,” she said.
The learning loss matters because it is not merely an educational problem. It is also a national security issue.
The World Bank has reported that Ukraine’s average PISA scores fell by 38 points between 2018 and 2022, roughly the equivalent of two years of schooling. A child who has missed years of ordinary school life may also have missed the daily practice of trust: arguing without breaking apart, working in teams, making friends despite differences, and learning how to tell reliable information from rumor. Those are precisely the tools and skills Ukraine will need as it rebuilds.
Despite all these concerns, Nechyporenko remains upbeat. She has seen that in technology, Ukrainians are not merely holding their own; they are winning because they are networked, agile, improvisational, and astonishingly effective. Ukrainian forces have destroyed Russian targets worth billions of dollars while spending only a minute fraction of that amount.
“It’s a battle between open systems and closed systems,” Nechyporenko said. “It’s not armies that fight. It’s nations that fight.”
That may be the deeper reason for her hope. Ukraine’s advantage is not only drones, software, or battlefield ingenuity. It is the habit of seeing a problem, naming it clearly, and then mobilizing talent around it.
If Russian disinformation is identified as the next front, Ukraine will not be defenseless. The same society that learned to improvise under bombardment can also learn to defend its classrooms, families, systems, and public trust.
The war after the war has begun. But Ukraine has already shown that once it understands the battlefield, it can change the terms of the fight. The country’s national habit of solving impossible problems may be the best possible answer.
Mitzi Perdue is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). She holds a BA from Harvard University and an MPA from the George Washington University.
As a journalist and war correspondent, she has reported extensively from Ukraine and is the co-founder of Mental Help Global, an initiative using AI to expand access to mental health support in conflict-affected regions.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
