Even while they are immersed in fighting the world’s most technologically advanced drone war, some of Ukraine’s top military and civilian leaders gathered recently in Kyiv to focus on what they see as the war’s next crucial phase, the battle for minds.
They were brought together in Kyiv, the capital, by Maria Berlinska, revered in Ukraine as a main driver behind the use of drones in the war against Russia. As a volunteer reconnaissance soldier in 2014, Ms. Berlinska pestered commanders to use drones, and founded Victory Drones, a nonprofit group that has trained thousands of drone pilots and brought in investment to develop Ukraine’s defense tech industry.
Now, she has formed another nonprofit organization, Victory Neurones, and last month gathered specialists in cognitive influence, a term that includes everything from strategic communications to cyberwarfare.
“Wars begin and end not in the trenches, but in people’s heads,” she told the gathering. “You are the experts. I want us to talk and to shake up this field.”
The first aims were to weaken public support in Russia for the war and reduce Moscow’s capacity to carry out a general mobilization in the coming months, she and other officials said.
Her reasoning was stark. Ukraine’s drones have been successful, but they would not win the war, she said.
Drones have enabled Ukraine in recent months to hold its front lines by killing three to four Russian soldiers on the battlefield for every Ukrainian fatality, she said. But if President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia ordered a mass mobilization, Ukraine would need to kill up to eight to 10 Russians for every Ukrainian killed, which would be difficult to sustain, Ms. Berlinska said.
Maj. Gen. Yevheniy Khmara, the acting head of the Ukrainian intelligence service, and Mykhailo Fedorov, the defense minister, were listening online and voiced their support.
“The situation in Russia is already beginning to shift,” Mr. Fedorov said. Ukraine was beginning to overtake Moscow’s dominance of electronic warfare and drones, and knew how to counter Russian ballistic missiles and guided aerial bombs, he said. “All that is left is to catch up with them in the information war, where Russia is No. 1 in the world.”
Cognitive warfare is not a new concept. Experts and technicians in the field said it encompassed propaganda, disinformation, hybrid attacks and psychological operations.
Russia has been a leader in the domain since Soviet times, spreading Communism and countering Western influence. It conducted multiple cyberattacks and information campaigns aimed at dividing Ukrainian society before its annexation of the Crimea in 2014, said Serhii Demediuk, who established Ukraine’s Cyberpolice Department in 2015 and heads the Institute of Cyber Warfare Research.
Since the onset of its full-scale invasion in 2022, Russia has combined hacking attacks against Ukraine’s energy and communications companies with influence campaigns that seek to undermine Ukrainian military recruitment drives and to drain Ukrainian support for the war, he said.
Countering the messaging is hard and demands resources, Mr. Demediuk said. “When you try to debunk something, you only reinforce the message.”
With Western help, Ukraine has proved resilient, moving its data centers into the global cloud to beat the cyberattacks, according to industry specialists. Technicians at the conference said they were confident that Kyiv could defeat Russia at the information game.
Ukraine’s intelligence service, the S.B.U., a successor of the Soviet-era K.G.B., is in the forefront of the information war, General Khmara said. “We neutralize Russian information operations and organize our own,” he said. But he welcomed the new focus and expansion. “Success can be achieved only together,” he told the conference.
The irony was not lost on Ms. Berlinska, who described accompanying Serhiy Zhadan, an author and musician, and Oleksandra Matviichuk, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and human rights defender, to a meeting in the S.B.U. headquarters, somewhere in the past they would have entered with shaking knees, she said.
Her plan is to spread the battle for cognitive influence far beyond the remit of the intelligence service.
The defense minister said he had created a center for cognitive warfare within his ministry and was seeking to finance it and scale up operations in the same way the Ukrainians expanded their defense industry.
“We see how network-centricity and competition work on the battlefield,” he said. “We need to understand what yields results and conduct systemic campaigns to seize the initiative.”
He said he wanted Russians to feel the consequences of the war. “We need to escalate this as much as possible,” he said.
Ideas from participants came thick and fast. Maria Kucherenko, a director of the Strategic Intelligence Institute in Kyiv, who teaches university courses on Russian elites and the history of Russia’s secret services, warned against underestimating Moscow.
She urged Ukrainians, many of whom rejected Russian because of the war, to return to study Russian language and society.
“It is not a question of whether Russian culture is great or not,” she said. “It is a question of our survival, of finding Russia’s weak points for asymmetric methods of influence. Because we will not win this war symmetrically.”
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