The points system whereby Ukrainian soldiers’ units earn credits for confirmed kills (with a bonus for live capture) of Russian and other nations’ hostile forces, which can be redeemed for drones and other materiel from plethora of international and domestic startups competing with established arms megacorps, as opposed to top-down procurement diktats reads to me as cyberpunk. The growing usage of (semi)autonomous ground drones on both sides also seems fairly cyberpunk in a
Terminator sense. The participation of forces from other rogue states like North Korea in exchange for food and arms is cyberpunk.
Reasonable people can disagree, as I alluded to above, but I wouldn’t say that disagreement on the points or in itself is pointless or wrong, which seems to be where we differ. Whether something is cyberpunk is in the eye of the beholder, a subjective experience in the reader of art and of literature and of history. I don’t see how you can say what something seems like to others, as that is to second guess their own experience of reality (or as mediated by fiction, in the the case of artistic works).
To me, the cyberpunk ethos can be summarized as high tech, low life. Utilizing literal convicts as frontline soldiers by Wagner in Ukraine seems to fit that description to a tee.
In light of the above combined with the routine usage of AI on all sides, the conflict in Ukraine as a whole seems to be a literal expression of “sustainable war” as depicted in Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045, which is widely regarded as a cyberpunk work.
https://breezewiki.com/Ghostintheshell/wiki/Sustainable_War
> In effect, the G4 nations went to war with each other in a "sustainable" manner managed by AIs: fighting deliberately avoided damaging major cities and essential infrastructure, mercenaries, and autonomous war machines were heavily used, and the goal of most battles was to destroy enemy structures, vehicles, and equipment while taking reasonable measures to capture rather than fatally harm human combatants when possible. In other words, the conflict would be sustainable as almost all losses could, in theory, be perpetually replaced by the military-industrial complex.