This article is adapted from a report written by Nataliya Bugayova and Kateryna Stepanenko, “A Primer on Russian Cognitive Warfare,” published on June 30 by the Institute for the Study of War.
Russia is using cognitive warfare—a form of warfare that focuses on influencing the opponent’s reasoning, decisions, and actions—to secure strategic objectives that are unattainable through its physical capabilities alone. It is not the only country to do so. China, Iran, and North Korea increasingly use cognitive warfare against the United States, too. But Russia has proven especially adept at using it to aid in its war against Ukraine, shape Western decisions, preserve President Vladimir Putin’s regime, and mask Russia’s weaknesses. Cognitive warfare is not the Kremlin’s only warfighting strategy. Nonetheless, it is vital to understand the Kremlin’s effort to try to make the world see things as Moscow wishes us to—and for us then make decisions in that Kremlin-generated reality.
The ultimate target of Russian cognitive warfare is the opponent’s will to act. To achieve more, Russia needs others to do less. Russia may very well lose if the West leans in to support Ukraine. The combined economies of NATO countries, non-NATO European Union states, and the United States’ Asian allies dwarf Russia’s, among other things. The Russian goal has therefore been to have the United States reason its way to the conclusion that Russia prevailing in Ukraine is inevitable—or even in accord with U.S interests—and that Washington should stay on the sidelines.
Cognitive warfare is not mere disinformation at a tactical level. Russia uses all platforms that transmit narratives—media, conferences, international frameworks, diplomatic channels, individuals—as tools of its cognitive warfare. The effort is also supported by physical activities. These physical tools include military exercises, sabotage, cyberattacks, and combat operations.
The Kremlin succeeds in this effort if it persuades others that it is too hard to know the real truth, too hard to resist Russia, and too hard to be sure which side is right and which is wrong.
Cognitive warfare is born out of need and opportunity. Russia is not weak, but it is weak relative to its goals. Putin’s aims have remained largely the same for years: namely, preserving his regime; reestablishing Russia as a great power, which presupposes regaining control over the former Soviet states; and establishing a world order in which the United States is weakened, NATO’s unity is broken, and Russia has decisive influence.
Putin lacks the means to achieve his goals, however. Russia is often neither strong enough to impose its will on others nor appealing enough to be a partner of choice. The country’s sphere of influence is largely an invented one. Russia’s neighbors are not willing to choose the country as an exclusive partner—if at all. Russia also lacks the military power to control others by force. It would take Russia more than 100 years to capture the remaining 80 percent of Ukraine at its current rate of advance, assuming that Russia can sustain massive personnel losses indefinitely. Other former Soviet states, such as Moldova, have resisted the Kremlin’s attempts at domination.
The Kremlin uses cognitive warfare to close gaps between its goals and its means. Its main cognitive effort is making the world accept, and never fight, Russian premises and actions. Russia will have a better chance of subjugating Ukraine if the Kremlin succeeds in making the world accept the false premise that Russian victory is inevitable and that continued Western aid to Ukraine is futile. Russia will have a better chance of imposing its will on others if the Kremlin succeeds in making the world accept the false premise that Russia simply deserves its sphere of influence.
The Kremlin has also been trying to portray Russia as righteous in order to limit resistance to Russian actions. It invests enormous energy in dismissing and concealing its atrocities.
Russian cognitive warfare is also about trying to conceal weaknesses while discrediting Russia’s targets. Far from the Kremlin’s portrayal of him as an effective war leader, Putin has, in reality, failed to achieve nearly all of his stated military objectives well over three years into the war—despite an estimated 1 million Russians being killed or wounded in the conflict. The Kremlin has been downplaying Ukraine’s successes, such as its liberation of occupied territories, as well as Russia’s failures, such as its inability to protect its international borders against the Ukrainian incursion into the Kursk oblast.
Russia’s cognitive warfare predates Putin’s rule; in fact, it spans decades. The strategy is rooted in the Soviet concepts of “reflexive control.” Soviet mathematician and psychologist Vladimir Lefebvre defined the term in 1967 as a process of transferring the bases for decision-making from one opponent to another—in other words, trying to change people’s reasoning processes to compel them to come to conclusions that, in this case, suit Russia and to act based on these conclusions in ways that advance Russia’s aims.
Russia’s cognitive warfare involves the recycling of Soviet messaging strategies and implements. Flaunting its conventional power—its nuclear weapons, its fleet, and its missile systems—is a tactic that the Soviets frequently used in their strategic messaging against the West. The Kremlin invested in expanding the reach and capabilities of the state news agency TASS (founded as the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union) in 2013 and 2014. TASS was a major source of Soviet domestic and foreign propaganda and was present in 116 countries during the Soviet Union’s rule.
The Kremlin intensified its external cognitive warfare efforts following a series of largely peaceful protests against corrupt regimes in former Soviet states, including Georgia’s 2003 Rose Revolution and Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution. Russia’s neighbors’ striving toward more transparent, Western-style governance threatened Russia’s goal to control those states, and Putin perceived this development as a threat to his regime. Putin stressed over the years that the Kremlin “should do everything necessary so that nothing similar ever happens 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 states.
Russia started to seed narratives about separatism in Ukraine as early as 2004. A decade later, in 2014, these narratives were used as a foundation of Russia’s hybrid operation aimed at seizing Ukraine’s eastern and southern regions, and later, its full-scale invasion in 2022.
The Kremlin has prioritized the expansion of its media conglomerate globally. The 2016 Foreign Policy Concept document named “strengthening Russian media’s positions in the global information space” among its priorities. During the same decade, Kremlin-controlled media organizations RT, TASS, and Sputnik launched a concerted effort to form partnerships with foreign media. The Kremlin has also been investing in a generation of Russia-favorable journalists through training programs.
Some Russian military writers have even argued that all activities, including kinetic operations, must be aimed at achieving informational effects. Russia’s 2016 Information Security Doctrine called for an independent Russian information policy, the segmented management of the Russian internet, and the elimination of Russian dependency on foreign information technologies. The country established the Military-Political Directorate in 2018 to instill the Kremlin’s ideology within the Russian armed forces. The Soviet Union similarly integrated political officers into its military to ensure the military’s alignment with the Communist Party’s ideology and objectives.
Putin has relied on this capability not only to wage wars but also to govern. In the early days of his presidency, Russian security services raided a major independent TV station. By 2003, Putin had established state control over Russian media. Every year since 2000 the Kremlin has introduced new forms of information control, and Putin has expanded his censorship regime since launching his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In April, the state sentenced a Russian teenager to nearly three years in prison for using 19th-century Ukrainian poetry to protest Russia’s war against Ukraine. The Kremlin’s efforts to create a national instant messaging platform are among its latest attempts to expand monitoring of domestic communications.
All this is effective—but only to a point. Cognitive warfare allowed Russia to make some gains that would have been impossible with conventional forces alone. The information backdrop of the Kremlin-induced escalation anxiety has shaped Western decisions about provision of military aid to Ukraine, resulting in lost opportunities for Ukraine and battlefield advantages for Russia.
Yet the Kremlin is overly dependent on cognitive warfare. It is also vulnerable to realities that undermine the narrative of a powerful Russia and a powerful Putin—one of Russia’s major unexploited weaknesses.
The key to defending against Russian cognitive warfare is doing so at the level of strategic reasoning while resisting the urge to chase Russia’s tactical disinformation efforts. The United States should understand what premises the Kremlin wants it to believe, which of Washington’s decisions it is trying to shape, and in support of which aims—and then should reject the premises that the Kremlin is trying to implant. For example, the United States has an opportunity to dismantle the notion that Russia is entitled to its claimed sphere of influence, or the claim that Russia will inevitably win militarily in Ukraine.
Actions are often the most effective ways to neutralize cognitive warfare. It was Ukraine’s successful drone and missile strikes against the Russian Black Sea Fleet that vanquished Russia’s effort to create a false perception that Ukraine was spoiling global food security. Ukraine’s military action denied Russia the ability to impose a de facto blockade and, as a result, enabled grain trade through the Black Sea.
While specific Russian narratives may change, the larger premises that the Kremlin is trying to establish through these narratives do not; neither do the overall goals that this cognitive warfare supports. This provides an opportunity for systematic situational awareness to monitor, forecast, and neutralize Russian cognitive warfare.
Russian overreliance on this capability has degraded the country’s real power and brought destruction to its society—damage that will take Russia generations to recover from, if recovery is at all possible. The West is best served by neutralizing Russian (and Iranian, North Korean, and Chinese) cognitive warfare efforts by revealing them, working to reject the false premises that they seek to create, and focusing on the real world, rather than operating within the artificial reality that cognitive warfare efforts seek to create.
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