After three years on Ukraine’s front lines, this is my warning to Europe

UKRAINE

Former British volunteer Elizabeth Bullock has witnessed Russia rewrite the rules of warfare, targeting civilian infrastructure and morale – it is a lesson NATO cannot ignore.

THE sudden high-pitched shrill had barely pierced her sleep before the Russian S-300 missile ended its supersonic flight with a devastating report, striking a few metres from the far end of the abandoned sanatorium.

Barely a moment passed before it was joined by another and another, until seven blasts had shaken the building to its foundations, spewing mangled iron, broken masonry and bright orange fire into the night sky.

In the chaos that followed, Elizabeth Bullock ran downstairs to shelter under the concrete stairwell, the floor strewn with broken glass.

With no military training, the 32-year-old former technology leader had already confronted fear after entering Ukraine just weeks after Russia’s full-scale invasion.

At the Polish-Ukrainian border, she looked on aghast as her vehicle passed hundreds of cars fleeing in the opposite direction toward the safety of Poland.

That was why she had forgone the comforts of home – to help Ukrainians escape the expected onslaught of Russia’s war machine.

She had intended her stay to last only a few weeks.

Now it was four months later, and her aid work had taken her almost 1,000 miles further inland to the Black Sea port city of Mykolaiv.

Russian attempts to seize it had been repulsed, but not abandoned. The bombardment was relentless.

She was a long way from her home in the UK, she was wearing only her pyjamas and she was certain she might not survive.

“I’d been under artillery fire before,” she recalls.

“When it’s day and you’re wearing your body armour and it’s a hot area, you’re already in the zone. But at night, you’re in your pyjamas with your dog snoring next to you on the floor and you feel a lot more vulnerable.

“You lie there hearing these things come over, missiles and Shahed drones, and you know that your home could be hit. If these missiles had struck nearer to our end of the building, I probably would not have survived.”

Nights like this would soon become grimly familiar across Ukraine, where missile attacks on urban centres were designed to wear down the civilian population.

For Bullock, the lesson was immediate: modern war was increasingly fought through the systems that make everyday life possible.

Now back in Britain, she warns that Western societies risk misunderstanding the nature of the threat, arguing that Russia’s long-term strategy against Europe is centred less on conventional invasion than on attacks targeting civilian infrastructure, morale and social cohesion.

“My focus has absolutely become hybrid warfare,” she says.

“The vulnerabilities that we have – the fact that it will be a tax on our civilian population – are what we need to understand.”

Working primarily across the Donbas and southern Ukraine, Bullock evacuated civilians from frontline areas, executed crisis drinking water solutions and reconstructed homes in villages the Russians had razed to the ground, often operating within kilometres of Russian positions.

“The vulnerability points of the civilian population are their communications, power and water,” she says.

“I lived through all of those things. The weaponisation of water, for example – Russia destroyed the pipelines feeding Mykolaiv, meaning people could not drink tap water. I even had to give my dog bottled water.

“No power means you can’t cook, you can’t charge devices, you lose communications.

“For a few days it’s manageable. When it’s weeks, it becomes something else entirely.”

Western audiences risk assuming Russia would primarily threaten NATO countries with tanks.

For many in Britain, the threat still feels geographically distant, rather than something that could unfold through disruptions to power, communications and everyday services at home.

“We mustn’t view Russia as a conventional army in strict terms,” she says.

“They are waging war on civilian life, infrastructure and morale. That is the model we need to grasp.”

Her experience also highlighted the growing importance of information warfare.

“The emotion Russia is best at leveraging is outrage,” she says.

“It tends to target the extremes of both sides of an argument in order to sow division. It doesn’t necessarily pick sides – it wants to divide and erode trust – trust in institutions, trust in the press, trust in what we see.”

“We all believe we are too smart to be influenced, but we are all subject to the material we are fed.”

Western governments and media organisations should have a more open public dialogue about hybrid threats facing European societies.

“The biggest mistake we are making is that we do not have an open and honest dialogue about the threats we face,” she says.

“If a serious cyberattack hits financial systems, or subsea cables are damaged, people need to understand clearly what that would mean for daily life.”

Bullock remains struck by Ukrainian resilience.

“I have never met a single Ukrainian who believes giving up territory would bring peace,” she says.

“They know it would simply create a springboard for future attacks.”

Recalling her initial decision to travel to Ukraine in 2022, she says: “It just felt important to do something.

“I thought I would be there a few weeks. It became three years.”

“It is important to grasp that this is not about Ukraine, in the most respectful way possible — it’s about Russia,” she says.

“It is about understanding how Russia’s modern conflict works – and how Russia will continue to attack civilian systems and social resilience across Europe.”