Social media is making the war in Ukraine feel simultaneously closer and more distant.

There’s so much information at my fingertips, yet I feel more powerless than ever. I can see what’s happening almost in real time and experience intense horror and sadness, but also wonder how I can reach through the tweets, TikToks and videos to help, sooth, protect, stop.

The power of social media, a thing we’ve been pillorying for years, is once again ascendant in this moment. It’s how we hear the resolve in Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s voice and see the video from inside the nuclear plant moments after it’s been captured.

It’s once again where we argue facts and policy, and pit one opinion against another. The difference in this moment is that social media is, unusually, almost entirely united in sentiment and purpose. The support for Ukraine and its people feels universal, though we know it isn’t.

But for all the discussion, news, and links that tell us how to help, it feels like our faces are pressed up against the hard glass of a calamity. We see it so clearly but cannot reach it.

That’s not the case everywhere, obviously.

Some, in Europe, have headed over to fight alongside the Ukrainian people, though they’re unsure if they’ll even make it to the border.

Aside from social media, technology has provided another new avenue of protest and attack, through cyber warfare. Anonymous and hacktivists are attacking Russia’s technology and infrastructure from all sides. But if we’re being honest, few of us are equipped to pitch in with that effort, either.

Instead, we’re faced with a wall of information on social media and news that is also crumbling as Vladimir Putin strips free and fair news protections and his forces disconnect and dismantle cell service and infrastructure.

Russia’s attack on Ukraine can also feel, when consumed through digital sources, like peering through a keyhole, pointed at a current attack or the words of an eyewitness. In European terms, Ukraine is a big country (larger than California, smaller than Texas), and it’s impossible to know the full extent of the conflict, even from all the sources we have to put the picture together. There are places of intense crisis and some that have yet to be consumed by Russia’s invading forces.

But that narrow scope of information only increases the feeling of helplessness.

As powerless as I feel reading live, unfiltered social media direct from Ukraine, I know that the blackout that will occur when Putin finally cuts power to 25% or more of the country will be worse. We may not know what’s happened for days, weeks, or months.

I believe Putin is well aware of not only the international disgust with his actions, but of how millions on social media are crying out in dismay and begging for him to realize that, aside from megalomania and psychopathy, he is as human as his prey.

He won’t, and will instead continue working to break the chain of information flowing to social media where we sit, horrified, angry, appalled, and deeply frustrated that we can’t make our tweets, short videos and Instagram posts into soldiers standing side by side with Ukraine.

The terrible reality is that no platform can truly bring us together to the same place, to share the same experience. We can only watch the fate of a democratic nation unfold from a distance, through a screen. Our fingers will touch and swipe, but those actions won’t be felt on the other side.

There must be more we can do. We must do more.