As of 2026, geopolitical actors are engaged in a harsh struggle. The world has become far more divided and dangerous. This process has many different causes. One of them is said to be preparation for a so-called phase transition — a rapid transformation of society across several areas at once: technological, economic, social, demographic, religious, and others.
States compete to be the first to pass through such a transformation. However, the highest level of this competition can be described as a “civilizational clash between nations.” Or as an ontological war. Competition that turns into confrontation takes place between different ontological platforms. These platforms represent not only a set of national interests, but also a general vision and perception of reality.
Thus, it can be argued that the ontological platform of a nation plays a key role in the competition for the right to shape the vision of reality. What does this mean?
Ontological Platform: The Concept
In recent years, we have used different categories to describe how our perception of reality differs from that of others: national idea, strategic narrative, identity, civilizational choice. All these categories serve as instruments. In essence, they are only components of an ontological platform.
An ontological platform is a comprehensive answer to several basic questions:
Who are we?
What features do we have as a single community, and how are we different from those who do not belong to it?
What is reality for us?
What do we consider good and evil?
What do we consider normal?
What future do we recognize as our own?
How is our future connected to our past?
What are we prepared to defend, and what do we exist for as a community?
Answers to these questions provide stability for the development of a community. Such a community can be much larger than a nation. For example, the people living on the European continent may share a common understanding and vision of the human being, human rights, dignity, and development. However, experience shows that even shared declared values do not guarantee the same attitude toward reality and threats among different nations. One example of such differences, showing the specific nature of ontological platforms, is the attitude toward the category of “dignity” among Americans, Europeans, and Ukrainians.
In the political sphere, we declare that Ukraine is part of Western civilization and shares European values. One of the key European values enshrined in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights under the Lisbon Treaty of 2009 is dignity. The right to dignity is established in Article 1 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. The right to life is established in Article 2, which demonstrates the priority given to dignity in the value hierarchy. Dignity is also mentioned several times in the Constitution of Ukraine and in the Law of Ukraine “On the Affirmation of Ukrainian National and Civic Identity.”
In an interview with FOX NEWS in February 2026, U.S. administration special representative Steven Witkoff, answering a question about what was preventing peace in Ukraine, said: “This is a stupid war… Everyone throws around the word ‘dignity.’ But what does dignity give you if you have so many deaths there?”
This is precisely the kind of concrete question that a nation’s ontological platform must answer. If “dignity” is one of our values, how do we practice it? What does it actually give us? How do we explain this to our domestic and foreign target audiences, including Steven Witkoff, whose work often affects the policy of President Donald Trump?
When there are no answers to this and the other questions listed above, chaos begins. Partners do not understand the logic behind actions and rhetoric. People without a shared picture of reality may live next to each other, but no longer together. Everyone then speaks their own language — not with different words, but with different meanings. State institutions may still exist and function, but conflict will grow within the public consciousness.
Therefore, building an ontological platform requires more than declaring the values shared by a community or nation. It is necessary to provide clear explanations of how these declared values are implemented through concrete life choices, behavior, motives for action, and explanations of reality.
Why, after declaring dignity one of its key values, does Europe do everything possible to avoid direct confrontation with Vladimir Putin, while he acts with impunity not only through hybrid warfare and disinformation, but also through sabotage and terrorist acts on the territory of European states?
There is a hypothesis that Europeans, having defined dignity as a key value, practice it by avoiding conflict.
Europe is a territory shaped by wars: the Hundred Years’ War, then the Thirty Years’ War, which ended with the Peace of Westphalia and created the modern concept of sovereignty, followed by the First and Second World Wars of the twentieth century. Deep psychological trauma caused by extreme violence has pushed Europeans to protect dignity by rejecting violent action. By rejecting conflict in principle, even when self-defense may be necessary. Instead, strong support was given to concepts such as permanent dialogue, multiculturalism, and trade as a way to gain benefits even where declared values may be sacrificed in order to avoid conflict.
Ultimately, the European Union itself was born from the Coal and Steel Community between France and Germany, designed so that the fear of losing economic benefits could restrain the desire to use violence. In this sense, the European practice of dignity takes the form of recognizing and accepting the needs of another person. Naturally, the expectation is that the other person will behave in the same way.
Ukrainians have experienced similar historical trauma, having suffered extreme forms of violence aimed at destroying us as a community. Yet Ukrainians practice dignity in the opposite way: through constant conflict among themselves.
Across a thousand years, the words of Prince Sviatoslav the Brave — “I am coming against you” — have entered everyday Ukrainian culture. Today, Ukrainians argue every day on social media and in messaging apps, attacking one another over current issues of common life: legalization of weapons, medical cannabis, distribution of erotic content, mobilization, leaving the country because of the war, or remaining in Ukraine.
Every Ukrainian constantly tests the boundaries of personal identity in order to prevent others from entering the space of personal dignity. For this reason, Ukrainians often verbally attack others on social media in order to spread their view of reality and express their position on questions of coexistence that remain uncertain or unresolved.
For the sake of dignity, Ukrainians enter into conflict, while Europeans avoid conflict. At the same time, businessman Steven Witkoff does not appear to understand what dignity can provide apart from death.
Perhaps the history of his family does not show him that giving up one’s identity under enemy pressure, accepting that one must no longer be Ukrainian or part of the Ukrainian nation but instead become someone else — a Little Russian or a Russian — does not mean the physical death of a person, but can mean the death of that person’s identity. On a larger scale, this can erase entire ethnic groups from the face of the planet.
The ontological platform of the Ukrainian nation can be erased either through physical genocide, through the total propaganda system of the Soviet Union, or through the indoctrination of young children in occupied territories. This has always been a specific objective of Russian imperialism toward the Ukrainian nation.
For Ukrainians, dignity therefore became not simply a declared ideal of behavior, but in practice one of the main instruments of national survival. Physical death could sometimes be avoided by swearing loyalty to the tsar, the General Secretary, or Moscow. But this required sacrificing historical memory and identity and becoming someone else. In other words, first dying spiritually, and later physically — for the ambitions and appetites of the ruler.
The only way to avoid this was, and remains, conflict — that is, the use of force.
At the same time, ideological figures of the Kremlin such as Alexander Dugin, Alexander Kharichev, Sergei Karaganov, and the head of Rospatriotcenter, Elena Belikova, all emphasize that human-centeredness, dignity, freedom, and other humanistic values are not features or characteristics of the so-called “Russian cultural code.” Some Russian authors use this term for their ontological platform, arguing that such a code can be “calculated” for every nation on the basis of history, geography, and political tradition.
These factors help explain the differences between ontological platforms.
A nation’s ontological platform is an operating system that defines the priorities, parameters, format, purpose, and reasons for interaction between people. It determines the difference between enemy and friend, between one’s own and the outsider. If such a basic operating system does not work, different parts of what appears to be a single structure begin to freeze, conflict, break down, or become infected by foreign code. They begin to adopt another, more effective operating system.
The main question is not whether a nation has an army, an economy, institutions, media, or technologies. The main question is what picture of the world supports all of them. Why and for what purpose should all these elements function together?
In terms of artificial intelligence, an ontological platform can be compared to a large language model, or LLM, which gives artificial intelligence the words and meanings with which it can operate. It also provides the parameters and restrictions that determine how the model is used.
A nation survives over a long period when it is capable of reproducing its own reality. Not only memory. Not only language. Not only tradition or belief. It must reproduce its own reality: its own way of seeing the world, naming things, distinguishing truth from falsehood, good from evil, its own from the foreign, freedom from arbitrariness, development from degradation.
This is an ontological platform.
How Is a Nation’s Ontological Platform Built?
It does not appear because of a single document. It does not arise from one speech. It is not born from one law. It is created through the repetition of the same type of behavior in different situations and crises. It is reflected in how each person treats themselves, their family, their community, and their state. It is reflected in how a person relates to their country as the space where they live, work, preserve memory, and ensure security.
A nation does not depend only on the state. However, without a state, a nation may lose its ontological platform, because state institutions invest in its construction and development. They do so through publishing books, producing films, supporting traditions in everyday life, education, habits, law, schools, rituals, language, symbols, punishments, rewards, and ways of life.
Building a nation’s ontological platform is not a manifesto or a declaration of subjectivity. It is the continuous, long-term transformation of meaning into a repeated form of life.
However, for public and everyday repetition to become reality, the nation’s ontological platform must be legitimized. In other words, after learning or inheriting a certain form of behavior, people who share certain values must recognize that behavior as their own. They must accept it voluntarily and reproduce the culture and behavior as their own.
Not through coercion, fear, or propaganda, but because the behavior corresponds to their upbringing, experience, pain, hope, and understanding of justice.
There is a strict rule here. A nation’s ontological platform can be considered legitimate and meaningful only when its declared form and authenticity do not diverge from its actual implementation. This is why Ukrainian experts, including Andrii Zablotskyi, describe Russia as an “ontological void” that does not generate its own natural reality.
In the words of its political leaders and intellectuals, Russia has become an eternal antithesis to Europe and the liberal-democratic political space. Russia constantly declares an “inescapable necessity” to wage a sacred war against Europe because, according to Russian speakers, Europe is guided by “decaying values.”
Ironically, when commenting on the new U.S. National Security Strategy, President Donald Trump repeatedly emphasized that Europe had allowed the “erasure of its values.” In practice, such statements mirrored the Russian rhetorical dynamic of defining itself in opposition to Europe.
An ontological void results from a synthetic approach to constructing an ontological platform that does not reflect the genuine patterns of behavior characteristic of a particular community.
An ontological void appears where a nation speaks about truth but lying is normal. Where people speak about freedom but live in humiliation. Where political leaders speak about equality but the elite demonstrates a caste system. Where science and education speak about the future but young people are shown no place in it.
What is required to create a clear, step-by-step framework for strengthening the resilience and expansion of a nation’s ontological platform? How can its advantage in the space of ideas and concepts be ensured?
First. Critically and openly analyze and define the values and virtues of the members of our community. What does it mean to be Ukrainian? How does a person behave when they identify themselves as belonging to the Ukrainian nation and holding Ukrainian citizenship? Which of our values are shared and understood in the same way by our friends? How are they different from the values of outsiders? What within these values pushes us to remain on the side of good despite all the accumulated pain of historical trauma? And do we truly have the strength to remain on the side of good?
Second. How does our repeated behavior, regular cultural practices, everyday rituals, and decisions in critical situations reflect us as carriers of particular values? How are our essence and our belonging to the community expressed through the daily practice of values? How do we practice dignity? How do we practice will and freedom?
Third. How do our values and daily behavior shape our understanding of “our own” and “others”? Does this understanding help us unite not only in moments of crisis, but also when we need to create durable institutions? Does our behavior, which communicates our values, help communities organize themselves into a civil society that supports its own members and protects itself from outsiders? Can the nation’s ontological platform maintain an equally effective vision of reality, the past, and the future for different local and regional communities that may differ in characteristics, ethnic origin, or traditions but share the main elements of the ontological platform?
Fourth. Does our understanding of “our own” and “others” prevent us from turning outsiders into our own? As stated above, one feature of an “ontological void” is the refusal to generate one’s own meanings in favor of rejecting the meanings of an opponent. In other words, it is the transformation of oneself into an antithesis. This is essentially what happened to Russia, which became the “shadow of Europe” in the Jungian sense.
While in practice being part of Europe and the European paradigm, the central part of Russia represented by Moscow and Saint Petersburg declares itself to be an “Eastern country” and an heir to the administrative and governance traditions of the empire of Genghis Khan. Russian speakers discuss this publicly and openly.
Using the same logic, Russian propagandists justify the full-scale aggression against Ukraine by claiming that Ukraine became “anti-Russia.”
Therefore, while distinguishing between “our own” and “others,” it is important not to allow a nation’s ontological platform to define itself through the rejection of outsiders. Moreover, victory over outsiders at the ontological level should aim not at their destruction, but at turning them into one’s own. This means imposing one’s own ontological platform rather than merely rejecting that of others.
To ensure integrity, resilience, and development, an ontological platform must be built on “open source” principles. It should be capable of keeping both Ukrainians living in Ukraine and Ukrainians around the world within a shared framework of values and behavior. There should also be mechanisms for voluntary accession to the Ukrainian political nation by those who share these values and are ready to reproduce the behavior required by them.
Fifth. An ontological platform with a strong foundation of historically formed values and repeated behavior must build strong walls in the form of state institutions that reproduce policies for developing the platform. These policies include preserving and reproducing culture and traditions, protecting and developing cultural heritage, strengthening and transmitting Ukrainian storytelling in the form of a so-called grand narrative, forming and reproducing symbols and symbolic policies of memorialization, commemoration and observance of important dates, implementing policies for strengthening Ukrainian identity, developing education, strategic communications, and media policy in the relevant fields.
For an ontological platform to be not only resilient to harmful and hostile influences, but also strategically stronger when it encounters other platforms, this conceptual framework must be transformed into a globally attractive, viable, and scalable model of life. In such a model, Ukraine must act not as an object of competition between empires, but as the creator of a new game for much broader communities.
Conditions must be created in which the principles governing the functioning and development of the Ukrainian nation’s ontological platform are so successful and effective that other communities would want to adopt them. These communities may not wish to become Ukrainian, but may seek to reproduce the same values and patterns of behavior.
One example of how an ontological platform can be successfully created and then, unfortunately, exhausted without continuous development and support is the idea of the “American Dream.”
In the classic formulation by its author, James Truslow Adams, it describes an order in which life should be “better and richer and fuller for everyone,” and where every person should be able to reach their “fullest stature” regardless of the circumstances of birth or social status. In its original meaning, it was not only about money. It was about the possibility of rising above initial limitations and becoming the best version of oneself.
In this way, the United States formulated answers to the basic questions of national existence. What is a person? Not a subject and not the holder of a fixed social position, but a free individual with the right to construct their own reality and future. What is society? Not a hereditary hierarchy, but a space of open competition, mobility, and self-creation. What is the state? An instrument designed not to distribute “destiny,” but to guarantee a framework of freedom within which an individual can act.
This platform contains a strong “ontology of time,” stretching from the first settlers and the Founding Fathers toward an open future in which tomorrow should not be determined by yesterday’s origin. From this came the culture of the “second chance,” belief in social mobility, and the connection between work, self-discipline, and success. Part of this code was historically supported by the Protestant ethic, which gave high moral value to work, thrift, and effectiveness in one’s “secular calling.”
The “ontology of space” within the “American Dream” presents the United States as a “land of opportunity” — a space where a person can start again, explore new opportunities, change their environment, and thereby change themselves.
During the twentieth century, this spatial vision became materialized in the image of a house, suburb, family, car, and college education for children. In other words, it became embodied in an everyday form of success. A safe and affordable suburban home became one of its most visible symbols. Does this not echo the Ukrainian dream of the “cherry orchard beside the house”?
Questions of security also played an important role in this spatial vision. They became part of the concept of service for men and women who joined the military or other security institutions.
The uncompromising ideas of the “American Dream” stated that a person is fundamentally free and that their value does not depend on origin. Reality is open to effort and self-redefinition. Success is morally legitimate if it is achieved through work, talent, and discipline. The future should be better than the past, and children should have a chance to live better than their parents. Accordingly, the nation exists not only as an ethnic group or territory, but as a political machine for producing opportunities. Such a mechanism carried the hope of a better life and was capable of turning outsiders into insiders. For many people, joining the American nation and its dream was desirable.
However, a nation’s ontological platform cannot remain static. Social evolution and technological progress require answers to the key questions of existence and identity to be constantly rebuilt, expanded, and made capable of creating new momentum for development.
For this reason, the “American Dream” is constantly tested: is the system guided by this ontology still fair, and what kind of future does it promise? Because of real difficulties in answering these questions, the “American Dream” continues to exist as a symbol, but works increasingly poorly as a reality, gradually turning into an ontological void.
The first sign is the loss of belief that the dream itself is achievable. In 2024, only 42% of Americans under the age of 50 believed that the American Dream was still achievable, while among people aged 65 and older the figure was 68%. The perceived attainability of the dream became strongly tied to income level. As a result, the dream stops functioning as a shared national framework and becomes an unevenly distributed privilege.
The second sign is the shift in the internal meaning of the dream from “unlimited opportunity” toward “stability.” In 2025, Americans increasingly tended to understand the “American Dream” as “stability” rather than “opportunity.”
The lower a person’s income and level of education, the more they seek stability rather than opportunity. This means that people may still celebrate trips to the Moon and new discoveries, but in everyday life they increasingly think in terms of security because they feel how unstable the world has become.
The nation’s ontological platform stops meaning movement forward and self-creation. It begins to mean simply “hold on and survive.”
The “American Dream” promised that you could become anyone if you were disciplined and worked hard. But the class divide weakens this promise. A difficult start in a poor family can no longer be overcome by work and talent alone because the chances of success in the modern world are decreasing.
This creates the crisis of the ontological platform described above: a divergence between the declared structure and real life. Where lies and distrust appear, an ontological void is born.
As early as 2022, according to surveys, around seven in ten Americans said that young people today face more difficulty than their parents’ generation in buying a home, paying for college, and saving for the future.
Naturally, these contradictions also produce distrust toward the institutions that were supposed to guarantee and develop the “American Dream.” Trust in the U.S. federal government in 2025 remained among the lowest levels recorded in nearly seven decades. Gallup reported that Americans’ collective confidence in key institutions had fallen to a new low, while Democratic and Republican assessments increasingly depended on which party controlled the White House.
Surveys also speak directly about an epidemic of loneliness and isolation and link weak social ties to poorer health, productivity, and engagement. The rapid evolution of social media has also contributed to the erosion of the “American Dream.”
The use of social media to publicly present a high standard of living that does not match actual conditions has moved status and the demonstration of success from physical reality into virtual reality.
Here again, we can repeat that where lies appear, an ontological void is born. The dream stops being universally convincing. Then it stops being shared. Then it loses its institutional foundation. After that, it narrows into private stability. In the end, only a brand remains, without a deep promise.
“A better, richer, and fuller life” moves from your living room to your Instagram page. In reality, you have to “survive war, prices, debt, rent, and polarization.” The aim is no longer to “open the future,” but simply “not to fall lower.”
The dream has not disappeared. The ontological platform continues to work for older, wealthier, and better-educated Americans. But no longer for everyone. A nation’s ontological platform can turn into an ontological void when its grand narrative can no longer convincingly connect freedom, mobility, institutional trust, and a sense of shared future.
Despite the current problems of the “American Dream,” it also serves as a strong example of ontological advantage, or cognitive advantage. An ontological platform built on “open source” principles — capable of accepting any individual — made large numbers of people want to emigrate in order to become Americans. Even more people in other countries watched American films, listened to American music, admired the success of American business, and wanted to behave like Americans.
Even a character in the chauvinistic film Brother 2, played by Russian actor Viktor Sukhorukov, shouts in one of the final scenes: “I’m staying! I’m going to live here!”
The greater attractiveness of an ontological platform and its ability to convert outsiders into insiders represent the ontological advantage that one platform can demonstrate over another.
There is no doubt that in the near historical future we cannot turn our enemies — Russians — into Ukrainians. However, the Ukrainian community and its ontological platform are part of the broader European community, even though we may interpret some declared European values in a more radical way.
Accordingly, the geographically European part of Russia not only can, but must accept and begin to practice the values that Ukrainian architects such as Feofan Prokopovych once helped place at the foundations of Russian society.
If the understanding and practice of human dignity changes from a declared and secondary concept into a daily practice for people living on the territory of the Russian Federation, then an imperial form of government will no longer be possible there. In that case, the administrative and territorial structure of the territory will no longer be the central issue. It will not matter whether it becomes a federal or confederal territory, or a number of autonomous or sovereign political entities.
The key point is that the people living there would become part of an ontological platform capable of gaining an advantage and filling the ontological void that currently dominates the territory of the empire.
Artificially creating an ontological platform is precisely what people around Sergei Kiriyenko are now trying to do. Public Russian speakers such as Kharichev, Dugin, and Karaganov are working to convince residents of the Russian Federation that their ontological platform has Eastern roots derived from the administrative and governance traditions of the Golden Horde and Genghis Khan.
This exact formulation appears in public statements in the media and at specialized events.
An ontological void can be filled only by returning people to certain basic settings of an ontological platform while making specific adjustments to that process. But for this to happen, a form of political will must emerge, based on a deep understanding of the situation and a systematic, evidence-based approach.
At present, such will can emerge only in Ukraine, if we choose this path. But in that case, the first step is to abandon scenarios and motivations that result from Ukraine remaining in the position of a victim and thinking through the logic of its own trauma. One example of such logic is rhetoric about the “collapse of Russia” as a scenario for the physical disappearance of the enemy, instead of investing effort in its reprogramming.
Such reprogramming may indeed result in the emergence of new political or administrative-territorial entities on the territory of the present-day Russian Federation. However, this is not the objective. It is a possible secondary outcome resulting from the adjustment of the ontological platform according to parameters defined by us.
As a result, the multi-frontier between the Ukrainian ontological platform and the Russian ontological void would move closer to China. For Ukraine, this would mean the end of the existential threat to future generations.
At the same time, it is necessary to be prepared for the fact that this path will require confrontation and competition not only with the Russian ontological void, but also with the ontological platforms of the United States and China. The European ontological platform would also need to be reprogrammed so that it can regain competitive capacity and become a major geopolitical actor.
