Russian President Vladimir Putin is escalating his offensive against Europe. After U.S. President Donald Trump’s failure to strike a “deal” with the Kremlin, Moscow has made repeated drone incursions into Poland and Denmark as well as broadening the range of its cyberattacks against other NATO members. Russia’s aggression has restarted the debate on what Europe and the United States can do to restrain it.
Ukraine’s allies have always pulled back from exerting maximum pressure on Russia. Now, that discussion is changing. Jack Watling of the Royal United Services Institute, for example, has argued for blocking Russia’s oil exports through the Baltic Sea while giving Ukraine the capability to hit Russia’s oil refineries. Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former Ukrainian defense minister, has advocated for disrupting military assets deep into Russian territory. In these combinations of kinetic and economic war, we need to add another dimension.
To make Putin worried enough to consider a cease-fire more seriously, we must act in the informational—or, as it is trendy to call it in security circles, the “cognitive”—domain. NATO is working on a new cognitive warfare concept, which the organization says will focus on how to “affect attitudes and behaviours by influencing, protecting, and/or disrupting individual and group cognitions to gain an advantage”—which includes being able to target informational campaigns to adversary audiences.
In our present context, information activities into Russia can have immediate tactical benefits, such as undermining conscription efforts—but these strategies are also an important part of any larger attempts to deter Russian aggression. Putin and his generation of rulers are obsessed with maintaining the perception that they can control the domestic situation inside Russia.
One of the reasons that the Kremlin rigs elections so brazenly is not because officials think anyone will believe the ridiculous results—but to show everyone that they have the power and ability to rig them. Their terror in letting things slip is visible in their obsessive polling of the population. It’s clear in the way that Russian elites and media classes speculate that Putin is in trouble when his rating dips—and how hard the propaganda works to drive it back up again.
At the war’s outset, rumors of mobilization sent an estimated 1 million people fleeing Russia, producing chaos that made the Kremlin look powerless. Since then, it has preferred to pour vast sums into paid contracts rather than risk the political shock of another uncontrolled exodus.
This generation of Russian leaders, mostly in their 60s and 70s, remembers the sudden fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, when a vast empire crumbled almost overnight. One of the few things that will get them to consider their belligerent foreign policy is the fear that their domestic control could slip. And one card that remains unplayed is subverting their control over the information domain.
There are three big questions about engaging the Russian public: Does it work? How can it be done in an environment of heavy censorship? And should the West use Russia’s own dirty tricks against it, or can it engage in a more ethical way?
One obvious place to start is undermining Russia’s recruitment to the armed forces and military-industrial complex. To sustain its operations, Russia requires 30,000 new recruits each month. The country currently recruits up to 1,200 people daily, according to Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service. On social media, the Kremlin has scaled recruitment into a mass-marketing operation. OpenMinds, a Ukrainian cognitive defense company, tracked at least 363,438 contract-service posts on VK—a Russian social media platform—between March 2022 and September 2024. After Ukrainian forces made an incursion into Russia’s Kursk region in early August 2024, the volume spiked threefold.
Ukrainian groups that attempt to undermine recruitment with information about the suffering of Ukrainian civilians do not turn most Russians against serving. Images of dead Russian soldiers, which one might assume would always discourage conscription, can increase support for the war, triggering a strong patriotic reaction and a desire to punish Russia’s enemies.
However, feedback from (now exiled) Russian journalists from provinces that supply many soldiers, as well as conversations with Russian prisoners of war and social research suggests that other issues can be more effective. These include the presence of criminals in the army, worries about families being paid compensation in case of soldiers’ deaths, the hit taken to social services due to the amounts being spent on the war, and the concern that soldiers who have been recruited for “cushy” jobs such as drivers will be sent to the front.
The struggle to fill the army’s ranks is only one front where information can magnify pressure. The other is economic life. Part of the purpose of sanctions is to force the Kremlin to spend more on satisfying peoples’ economic demands, and there is some evidence of greater economic unhappiness.
There has, for example, been a rise in the number of complaints submitted on the government’s Gosuslugi portal—the digital backbone of how Russian citizens interact with the state. More than 80 percent of complaints were related to quality-of-life issues such as roads, housing, and communal services. Research by the U.S. data analytics company FilterLabs shows that these socioeconomic issues are the ones that the Kremlin struggles most to control the narrative about.
Such existing weaknesses offer tremendous potential leverage, especially if Russia’s foes take advantage of moments of exogenous shock in order to undermine the Kremlin’s sense of control over the country. Take, for example, the Ukrainian incursion into Kursk. The Russian regime was stunned. The military and propaganda systems were in paralysis. In polling trust to Putin fell to a record low for the period of the war: only 45 percent Of Russians put him as one of their top three most trusted politicians, down from a high of 54 percent
That should have been the moment to increase pressure from many vectors: imposing secondary sanctions on Chinese banks, blockading the Russian oil fleet and placing sanctions on ports where Russian oil is delivered, and facilitating information campaigns to undermine the Kremlin’s confidence in keeping peoples’ attitudes and behaviors under control. A Kremlin threatened on multiple fronts will take the risks of the war more seriously—and perhaps be deterred from future aggression.
Up until now, the West has tended to let Russia recover after every shock and then responded in its own good time. At the root of this method appears to have been a fear of escalation—which has been shown over and over as a total misunderstanding of how to restrain Russia. Consider how long the United States stopped Ukraine from striking missiles at Russian army bases inside Russian territory, worried that this might provoke Russia. Now, such strikes are commonplace, and that fear seems absurd.
So if that is why this activity is necessary, the next challenge is to answer how to do it.
Today, we have many tools at our disposal—social media news channels and groups, online video ads, and satellite TV. Online censorship is increasing, but still possible: The trick is to provide content that is so important to audiences that they will be prepared to seek it. Since 2022, Ukrainian technology specialists from the private sector have thrown their energies into using the latest tech to test what topics work inside Russia. They are experimenting with ways to overcome Russia’s ever more draconian censorship by testing messages, measuring behavioral shifts, and pioneering ways to reach audiences by going to the sort of internet spaces that they use, and using issues they care about, such as how to defect.
Our information activities into Russia, however, should not imitate the Kremlin’s toolbox of lies. Facts and the repressed truth are potent on their own. One challenge is whether content should be attributable, such as from official NATO or government accounts, or whether they should disguise their provenance. The former messages are risky for Russians to share. The latter are at risk of being found out the moment that they start having any real impact. This question can be specific to the context of what you are trying to achieve, but it can also be a false dichotomy.
In World War II, the British Political Warfare Executive created subversive radio stations to broadcast into Germany. At first, the agency disguised them as renegade German stations, but when this was exposed, the British adapted, making it clear that they were behind the broadcasts while keeping them safe to listen to by not branding them officially.
The content—granular details of soldiers’ lives, gossip about officials, and even pornography—proved more powerful because it showed a deep understanding of conditions on the front. British surveys of prisoners of war indicated that more than half of German soldiers listened to these stations, even knowing the source.
Likewise, during the Cold War, when U.S. “freedom radios” that broadcast into the Soviet Union were revealed to be funded by the CIA, it only enhanced their popularity. People in the Soviet bloc wanted to know what the Americans knew about their system. By the end of the Cold War, half of audiences in captured countries tuned in.
Today, we need to try to match that ambition. Sadly, Washington is in the process of destroying these legacy international media outlets that it created in the Cold War, and the independent Russian media generally only engage, at most, 14 percent or so of Russian audiences that follow liberal media sources. We will need a flotilla of new communication initiatives to fulfill this mission.
The Armed Forces of Ukraine, and maybe other militaries, of course use psyops targeted at adversaries. But to help change the course of the war, you need media at scale engaging beyond the liberal bubble, from which foreign influences are bound to be discovered fast. Putin has already convinced most Russians that a so-called Western information war is besieging the country . Russians already assume that the West is trying to influence them. The task for the West is not to hide the origin of its content but to impress how detailed its understanding is of what really goes on inside the Russian system while minimizing risk for audiences.
This is also an opportunity to show how different allies and sectors can work together. Some countries with high-risk appetite, most obviously Ukraine, will specialize in delivering content. Others are developing the tech to break through censorship and reach into Russia. This will also mean working across sectors: The private sector can lead on innovation, whereas civil society can be much more agile than slow government and military in creating new media and campaigns.
The very act of collaborating across countries and sectors is integral to what we might call “cognitive deterrence”; it shows Putin that we are united and ready to take the game to his greatest vulnerabilities.
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