There is an image of the war in Ukraine which, in my view, sums up a part of the tragedy of the 21st century.

A man is at the bottom of a trench. He is cold. He is covered in mud. He sleeps underground. He suffers from skin diseases, exhaustion, trauma, the same psychological wear and tear that military doctors were already observing in soldiers from 1914-1918.

Around him, the earth has been churned up by artillery. In some places, when modern vehicles and antennas are removed, the photograph could almost have been taken one hundred and ten years ago.

And a few meters above this man flies a machine equipped with a camera, connected to an operator sometimes located very far away, capable of spotting him, following him, transmitting his coordinates and, in some cases, coming to kill him itself.

The trench and the algorithm now occupy the same battlefield. That's what interests me about the Russo-Ukrainian war. It doesn't simply represent a modern war. It superimposes several ages of warfare.

Mass artillery. Mines. Trenches. Cold. Infantry. Then satellites, electronic intelligence, digital communications, imagery, jamming systems, algorithms and above all drones.

I have been observing drones for a very long time. Long before Ukraine turned their military use into a daily spectacle, I understood that these machines would profoundly change several professions. From the mid-2000s onwards, I followed with great interest the debates that unfolded, even reaching the Senate, surrounding drones.

We ourselves had experimented with the first devices with image professionals. I was a pilot. I knew about helicopters. So I immediately understood what a flying machine that eliminated the need for an onboard pilot represented.

The first drones we used were almost insignificant compared to those of today. They could cost fifty or one hundred thousand euros. Their battery life was ridiculous. Sometimes only about twenty minutes.

Anti-collision systems were primitive or nonexistent. A branch could end the flight. You had to learn to pilot a machine that had virtually no awareness of its environment. And yet I already knew that something had just changed.

The helicopter requires a pilot. Heavy maintenance. Fuel. Hours of training. Extremely strict regulations. And above all, it carries with it the human risk. The drone shifts that risk.

This transformation would revolutionize the economics of aerial imagery. A large part of the missions formerly carried out by helicopter could gradually be accomplished by much less expensive aircraft.

Entire companies have had to transform or disappear. Helicopters have obviously retained irreplaceable functions: mountain rescue, emergency medical services, specialized transport, certain technical or military operations.

But for a considerable part of the aerial image, the world had changed. I watched this transformation with dizzying interest because it confirmed a rule I already knew from Groupe Serveur: when a technology drastically reduces the cost of a capacity, it does not just change the tool; it reshapes the economy that lived around that capacity.

Then the Chinese arrived with extraordinary industrial power. DJI became a global player. In France, Parrot had a remarkable head start. I followed this company very closely, even considering at one point a significant stake in it.

But global industrial competition has changed scale. And today the European paradox is striking: we are discovering, militarily, the strategic importance of a sector for which we had, however, possessed some of the civilian expertise very early on.

The war in Ukraine has shattered all categories. A drone is no longer just an aerial device. It can be a camera. A relay. An artillery observer. A jammer. A decoy. A reconnaissance device. A loitering munition. An FPV platform. A naval system. An autonomous or semi-autonomous device.

And this diversity alters the economic dynamics of warfare. Relatively inexpensive equipment can help neutralize infinitely more expensive equipment. That's the asymmetry.

For decades, military power has been partly measured by the price and sophistication of platforms. A tank. A plane. A helicopter. A ship. The drone introduces another geometry: how much does it cost to destroy what cost me a hundred times, a thousand times more?

It's an economic issue as much as a military one. And it's producing an extraordinary acceleration of innovation. Ukrainians and Russians are constantly modifying their systems.

A countermeasure emerges. The adversary immediately seeks to circumvent it. Jamming. Frequency change. Different navigation. Increased autonomy. Night vision. Onboard intelligence.

Then comes what seems almost like a step backward: the wire. FPV drones are now connected by fiber optic cable. In a war saturated with electronic warfare, the physical link is once again becoming a response to the sophistication of jamming.

I find this reversal appalling. We spent decades eliminating cables. And now the battlefield is reintroducing wire precisely because it's becoming difficult to jam by radio. The very old is returning to protect the very new.

I myself had been thinking about tethered drones around the Abode of Chaos long before this war. A physically connected device can remain airborne for a very long time if it receives power from the ground and continuously transmit its image via the cable.

Within an appropriate civil and regulatory framework, the principle interested me for site surveillance: a prowling, unarmed drone, complementary to the dozens of cameras already present, capable of looking at the architecture from a different angle.

Once again, I wasn't just seeing the drone as an object. I was looking at the infrastructure around it. Power. Transmission. Positioning. Autonomy. Resistance to interference.

The Ukrainian war is now pushing these questions to their most terrible consequences. A man can hear a drone approaching and know that he might be personally targeted. It's a psychologically new experience of warfare.

The shell is statistically lethal. The drone may appear to look before it kills. It follows. It changes direction. It descends. It may pursue a vehicle or search for an opening in a shelter.

For the soldier who sees it coming, the machine almost acquires an intention. This apparent personalization of the threat produces a particular kind of terror. And the videos circulate. We sometimes witness, on our screens, the last minute of a man's life.

I find this trivialization extremely worrying. War is becoming contained. A drone chases a soldier. The video is edited. Broadcast. Commented on. Shared. Sometimes almost consumed like a video game sequence.

That is exactly the question I was asking with Daesh: what becomes of our relationship to violence when its visual representation is integrated into the process that produces it?

The drone doesn't film the war after the fact. Its camera is part of the weapon. It's used for aiming. It's also used for documentation. And this documentation then becomes propaganda, military evidence, intelligence, media content, or entertainment.

The camera and the projectile merged.

This is an anthropological rupture.

I had long sensed this fusion in the Abode of Chaos. I built sculptures of drones and birds there as early as the 2000s. One huge bird in particular carries the camera in its center.

I already suspected that one of the natural directions for these machines would be biomimicry. Birds have a millions of years of evolutionary advantage over our aeronautics. Their shape. Their movements. Their stealth. The way they use air masses.

Why should the drone remain forever a small, four-armed helicopter? The machine will inevitably learn from wildlife. And the more it resembles living things, the more difficult another boundary will become: the one that distinguishes the natural observer from the artificial one.

This is where the drone intersects with the algorithm. Because the real change isn't simply that the device flies without a pilot on board. The decisive shift will occur when humans no longer need to decide on every single micro-action.

Detection. Classification. Navigation. Avoidance. Route selection. Swarm coordination. Pattern recognition. We are gradually entering a war where part of the decision-making time is delegated to the machine.

This is precisely what makes Ukraine so closely watched by military leaders around the world. This conflict tragically constitutes a large-scale laboratory for new military technologies. Industrialists are watching. Armies are watching. Intelligence services are watching.

Western, Russian, Ukrainian, and other systems are facing an environment where the adversary is also learning. And that's what revolts me.

Behind the lessons learned, the arms fairs, the efficiency statistics, and the new contracts, there are men who are dying. An industrialist might ask:

How did our system perform?

The soldier, however, was inside the response.

We must always put this human reality at the center. Otherwise, we turn war into a testing ground. And that is precisely what I refuse to do.

I fully understand the need for an army to learn. But I refuse to let technological vocabulary make us forget what experimentation is when it takes place in a real war.

The feedback is written using bodies.

This is where Ukraine becomes, for me, one of the most paradoxical wars of our time. The most advanced technologies coexist with living conditions reminiscent of the First World War.

Men live underground. They dig. They reinforce. They are cold. They wait. Artillery strikes. Mines close off the land. Mud immobilizes.

The wounded exhibit physical and psychological trauma reminiscent of earlier descriptions of industrial warfare. Then a satellite terminal appears in the shelter. An operator examines a thermal image. A drone takes off. An algorithm helps identify a shape.

1916 and 2026 can be fifty meters apart.

It's an extraordinary temporal collision. And it says something terrible about progress.

We have made progress in our ability to see. To communicate. To calculate. To strike. But the human body at the bottom of the trench remains virtually the same. It feels cold in the same way. It bleeds in the same way. It feels fear in the same way. Technology transforms war much faster than it transforms the person who has to endure it.

This is also why I refuse to view this conflict solely as Russia versus Ukraine. There are obviously two states at war and a large-scale Russian aggression launched in February 2022. But surrounding the battlefield is a considerable international architecture: Western military aid, intelligence, sanctions, the arms industry, external support for Russia, and technological competition.

The conflict therefore has several simultaneous layers. And beneath these layers lies a particular tragedy: Russians and Ukrainians have extremely deep historical, linguistic, familial and cultural ties.

I see it even in my own companies. Russian and Ukrainian employees may have family on both sides. For them, the geopolitical map suddenly becomes a family story. A cousin. A brother. A grandmother. A town they went to as a child.

This is where the word "fratricide" takes on its full meaning. It obviously does not negate Ukrainian sovereignty or the responsibility of the state that launched the large-scale invasion. It describes another reality: the proximity between populations sometimes exacerbates the violence of the rift.

And above this war hangs the fog. Clausewitz spoke of the fog of war long before satellites, the internet, and social media. We might have thought that more sensors would dispel this fog. Almost the opposite has happened.

We have never possessed so many images, and it has never been so difficult to determine immediately which ones tell the truth.

HUMINT, SIGINT, OSINT, commercial satellites, Telegram videos, drone images, geolocation, social media: each can contribute to documenting the conflict. Each can also be used to deceive. Information abundance does not eliminate disinformation; it provides it with more material.

It's a paradox I've known since my first databases: the more data you have, the more important the quality of the source becomes. And artificial intelligence will only amplify this problem.

An image can be authentic. Modified. Generated. Taken out of context. Falsely dated. Cognitive warfare will completely merge with kinetic warfare. Ukraine is already giving us the beginnings of this world.

Finally, there is another consequence of this war that particularly interests me because it connects to my entire industrial history: energy. Europe, and particularly Germany, had built part of its industrial competitiveness on significant access to Russian gas.

The breakdown of this relationship, the sanctions, the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines, and the restructuring of supplies have produced a major shock. I know firsthand what the price of energy means.

As a child, I experienced the oil crises in a family that owned a petrochemical business. Later, I myself had to work in this industry. In a petrochemical complex, energy can represent a significant portion of the costs.

When its price skyrockets, it's not just an abstract line in an economic report. It's the very competitiveness of the factory that is jeopardized. I also worked on raw materials and the Cyclope database. Brent. WTI. Gas.

So I also view the war in Ukraine through this chain of consequences. An explosion on a pipeline in the Baltic Sea can end up a few months later in the cost price of a German chemical product. Then in a manufacturer's decision to reduce production. Then in employment. Geopolitics comes into play.

That's why I painted Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2. A gas pipeline is a gigantic geopolitical sculpture. Steel laid on the seabed connects two economies and simultaneously creates a mutual dependence.

Anyone who only sees a pipeline understands nothing. You have to consider the contracts, the energy, the industry, Russia, Germany, the United States, Europe, and sovereignty. The destruction of infrastructure of this nature is therefore never merely a technical event. It reconfigures the balance of power.

And Germany, the quintessential industrial power, finds itself facing an extraordinarily difficult transition, combining energy transformation, Chinese competition, automotive change and the economic consequences of the war.

However, I want to avoid overly simplistic causal explanations. Obviously, not all of Germany's difficulties stem from Ukraine, just as Fukushima alone does not explain all of Germany's energy policy.

But the conflict acted as a brutal accelerator of pre-existing vulnerabilities. This is precisely how major crises work. They don't always create the crack. They reveal the one that already existed.

And that's where I come back to the Abode of Chaos. The drones have been there for twenty years already. The machine-birds. The cameras. The sculptures. The networks. The maps.

Then came Yanukovych, Tymoshenko, Klitschko, Poroshenko, Zelensky, Putin, the generals, the NATO leaders, Nord Stream, the images of Donbas and of the war. Again, I didn't fabricate this geopolitics for the sake of the book. The book rediscovers the geopolitics that the walls had already recorded.

And when I look at my old drones carved in the Abode of Chaos today, their meaning has changed. At first, they spoke of surveillance, vision, technological mutation, biomimicry. After Ukraine, they also speak of death.

The work itself hasn't changed. History has imbued it with a new layer. That's what I call a living work of art. It doesn't need to be repainted to continue evolving. The world is working on it.

The war in Ukraine is therefore, for me, much more than just another European war. It is the place where several military eras have collided.

Grandfather's trench.

The grandson's drone.

Industrial artillery.

The satellite.

Mud.

Fiber optics.

The shivering soldier.

The algorithm that calculates.

And, between the two, this old permanence that all our technology has never managed to abolish: in the end, it is always a human body that receives the war.