Russia’s Cognitive Warfare Against Ukraine

This article is taken from a a report Written by Natalia Poguva and Catina Stebanenko, “Introduction to the Russian Cognitive War”, which was published on June 30 by the Institute of War Study.

Russia uses the cognitive war – a form of war that focuses on influencing the opponent’s thinking, decisions and actions – to secure strategic goals that cannot be achieved through its financial capabilities alone. It is not the only country to do so. China, Iran and North Korea are increasingly using the knowledge war against the United States as well. But Russia has proven to be a particularly skill in using it to help its war against Ukraine, forming Western decisions, preserving the regime of President Vladimir Putin, and mask of weaknesses in Russia. The cognitive war is not the only Kremlin fighting strategy. However, it is important to understand the Kremlin’s efforts to try to make the world see things as Moscow would like to us-and we make decisions in this reality created by the Kremlin.

This article is taken from a a report Written by Natalia Poguva and Catina Stebanenko, “Introduction to the Russian Cognitive War”, which was published on June 30 by the Institute of War Study.

Russia uses the cognitive war – a form of war that focuses on influencing the opponent’s thinking, decisions and actions – to secure strategic goals that cannot be achieved through its financial capabilities alone. It is not the only country to do so. China, Iran and North Korea are increasingly using the knowledge war against the United States as well. But Russia has proven to be a particularly skill in using it to help its war against Ukraine, forming Western decisions, preserving the regime of President Vladimir Putin, and mask of weaknesses in Russia. The cognitive war is not the only Kremlin fighting strategy. However, it is important to understand the Kremlin’s efforts to try to make the world see things as Moscow would like to us-and we make decisions in this reality created by the Kremlin.

The ultimate goal of the Russian cognitive war is the will of the opponent to act. To achieve more, Russia needs others to do less. Russia may lose well if the West tends to support Ukraine. The economies of NATO countries combined, the countries of the European Union are not NATO, and the Asian allies of the United States dwarf us from other things. Therefore, the Russian goal was for the United States to have its way to the conclusion that Russia prevalent in Ukraine is inevitable – or even according to the interests of the United States – and that Washington should remain on the margin.

The cognitive war is not just misleading information at the tactical level. Russia uses all platforms that transmit novels – media, conferences, international frameworks, diplomatic channels, and individuals – as tools of its cognitive war. The effort also supports physical activities. These material tools include military exercises, sabotage, electronic attacks and combat operations.

The Kremlin succeeds in this effort if others persuade that it is very difficult to know the true truth, and it is difficult to resist Russia, and it is very difficult to make sure of any right side and any mistake.

Cognitive war is I was born of need and opportunity. Russia is not weak, but it is weak for its goals. Putin’s goals remained as large as for years: the preservation of his system; Re -establishing Russia as a superpower, assumes the restoration of control of the previous Soviet countries; And the creation of a global system in which the United States weakens, NATO is broken, and Russia has a decisive impact.

Putin lacks the means to achieve his goals. Russia is often not strong enough to impose its will on others or attractive enough to be a selection partner. The country’s scope is largely invention. Russia’s neighbors are not ready to choose the country as an exclusive partner – ever. Russia also lacks the military power to control others by force. It will take more than 100 years to get the remaining 80 percent from Ukraine at its current progress rate, assuming that Russia can maintain huge employee losses indefinitely. Other previous Soviet countries, such as Moldova, resisted the Kremlin’s attempts to dominate.

The Kremlin uses the cognitive war to fill the gaps between its goals and means. His main knowledge effort is to make the world accept, non -fighting, Russian buildings and procedures. Russia will get a better chance to subjugate Ukraine if the Kremlin succeeds in making the world accept the wrong hypothesis that Russian victory is inevitable and that the continuous Western aid to Ukraine is useless. Russia will get a better chance to impose its will on others if the Kremlin succeeds in making the world accept the wrong hypothesis that Russia is simply deserves its scope of influence.

The Kremlin is also trying to portray Russia as valid in order to reduce the resistance of Russian actions. He invests tremendous energy in rejecting and disappointed.

The Russian cognitive war also revolves around an attempt to hide weaknesses as Russia’s targets are discredited. Away from the Kremlin depicting him as an effective leader of the war, Putin failed, in fact, to achieve almost all his military goals declared over the war – despite an estimated one million Russians killing or wounded in the conflict. The Kremlin reduced the successes of Ukraine, such as liberating the occupied territories, as well as Russia’s failures, such as its inability to protect its international borders from the Ukrainian incursion into the Corsak Oblast.

The Russian cognitive war precedes Putin’s rule; In fact, decades extend. The strategy is eradicated in Soviet concepts of “reflexive control”. The Soviet mathematician Vladimir to replace this term in 1967 as a process of transferring the rules for making decisions from one opponent to another-and in other words, identified in an attempt to change the thinking of people to achieve Russia’s goals.

The Russian cognitive war includes recycling of Soviet correspondence strategies and tools. If its traditional power – nuclear weapons, and its fleet, and missile systems – boasts a tactic that the Soviets frequently use in their strategic messages against the West. The Kremlin invested in the expansion of the arrival of the government news agency Tass (established as a TIGRAF Agency for the Soviet Union) in 2013 and 2014. Tass was a major source of Soviet local and foreign propaganda and was present in 116 countries during the rule of the Soviet Union.

The Kremlin intensified his external cognitive efforts in the wake of a series of large peaceful protests against corrupt regimes in the previous Soviet states, including the Rose Revolution in Georgia 2003 and Urang Ukraine revolution for the year 2004. Russia’s neighbors have threatened more transparent governance in Western style Russia’s goal of controlling those countries, and Putin considered this development as a threat to his regime. Putin has stressed over the years that the Kremlin “must do everything necessary so that nothing is similar in Russia”, and the Kremlin launched a series of information operations to stop and reverse the loss of Russian influence in Ukraine and other former Soviet countries.

Russia began implementing novels on separatism in Ukraine early in 2004. After a decade, in 2014, these accounts were used as a basis for the Russian hybrid process aimed at seizing the eastern and southern regions of Ukraine, and after that, they invaded them in 2022.

The Kremlin gave priority to expanding its media bloc worldwide. The 2016 Foreign Policy Concept Document is the name “Promotion of Russian Media Sites in Global Information” among its priorities. During the same decade, Kremlin RT, Tass and Sputnik media organizations have made a concerted effort to form partnerships with foreign media. The Kremlin was also investing in a generation of journalists who were called Russia through training programs.

Some Russian military writers have argued that all activities, including motor operations, should aim to achieve media effects. The principle of information security in Russia for 2016 called for an independent Russian information policy, the segmented administration of the Russian Internet, and the elimination of Russian dependence on foreign information technologies. The country established the Political Military Directorate in 2018 to instill the Kremlin’s ideology within the Russian armed forces. Likewise, the Soviet Union merged political officers in its army to ensure the army consensus with the ideology and goals of the Communist Party.

Putin has relied on this ability not only on technical wars but also to rule. In the early days of his presidency, Russian security services raided a major independent television station. By 2003, Putin established the state’s control of the Russian media. Every year since 2000, Kremlin has introduced new forms of information control, and Putin has expanded the control system since its widespread launch of Ukraine. In April, the state sentenced a Russian teenager to approximately three years in prison for use in the nineteenth century of Ukrainian poetry to protest against Russia’s war against Ukraine. The Kremlin’s efforts to create an immediate national message platform are among its latest attempts to expand the scope of local communications monitoring.

All this is effective – but only to some extent. The cognitive war of Russia allowed some gains that were impossible with traditional powers alone. The background of the information was formed to worry about the Kremlin’s escalation, Western decisions about providing military aid to Ukraine, which led to lost opportunities for Ukraine and the battlefield of Russia.

However, the Kremlin excessively depend on the cognitive war. It is also subject to the facts that undermine Russia’s strong narration and powerful Putin – one of the main unexploited weaknesses in Russia.

key Defense against the Russian cognitive war does this at the level of strategic thinking while resisting the desire to chase the efforts of the tactical misinformation of Russia. The United States must understand what buildings the Kremlin wants to believe, any of Washington’s decisions that are trying to form, and support targets – and then it must reject the buildings that the Kremlin tries to plant. For example, the United States has an opportunity to dismantle the idea that Russia is entitled to obtain its demand for its demand, or the claim that Russia will inevitably win a military in Ukraine.

The procedures are often the most effective ways to neutralize cognitive war. The successful strikes in Ukraine were the strikes and missile against the Russian Black Sea fleet that defeated Russia’s efforts to create a wrong perception that Ukraine was spoiling global food security. Ukraine’s military action was deprived of Russia of the ability to impose an actual harvest, and as a result, the grain trading has enabled the Black Sea.

While the specific Russian accounts may change, the largest buildings that the Kremlin tries to prove through these accounts are not; Do not do the general goals supported by this cognitive war. This provides an opportunity for systematic circumstantial awareness to monitor, predict and neutralize the Russian cognitive war.

The Russian dependence on this ability has deteriorated the real power of the country and brought the destruction to its society – which will take the generations of Russia to recover, if the recovery is possible at all. It is better to serve the West by neutralizing the efforts of the Russian cognitive war (North Koreans, and Chinese) by revealing them, working to reject the wrong buildings they seek to create, and focus on the real world, instead of working in the artificial reality that the efforts of the knowledge war seek creation.