Russia’s information operations against the West are not propaganda seeking to convince, but cognitive warfare designed to fragment reality itself and paralyze democratic decision-making.
The most common mistake in interpreting Russia’s actions against the West is to keep calling them propaganda. Propaganda implies a message, an ideological content meant to be transmitted. Contemporary Russian strategy works differently. It operates through subtraction, dissolving the very possibility of judgment.
This is the central argument of a new study by General Nicola Cristadoro, published by the Gino Germani Institute and examined by Decode39. The paper, titled “When the Bear Dresses as a Serpent,” examines Russian cognitive warfare as a tool of strategic pressure against liberal democracies. Through intelligence operations, disinformation, and the management of reactions, Moscow seeks to weaken the decision-making capacity and cognitive cohesion of Western societies. Insight News Media investigated how these theoretical frameworks manifest in practice across European media ecosystems through coordinated disinformation campaigns.
The terrain on which the Kremlin’s cognitive warfare unfolds has deep roots. During the Cold War, the KGB defined “aktivnye meropriyatiya”, or active measures, as clandestine operations aimed at influencing political life and decision-making processes in target countries. As former KGB officer Yuri Bezmenov explained in the 1980s, more than 80% of resources were devoted to ideological subversion, with the goal of distorting perceptions of reality to the point where any rational conclusion became impossible.
That paradigm was never abandoned. It was updated. While Soviet propaganda was rigidly ideological, contemporary Russian information warfare is fluid, contradictory, and adaptive. It does not seek adherence. It induces confusion.
At the doctrinal core lies reflexive control, a concept developed by Soviet military thought and refined in the post-Soviet era. The principle is straightforward but devastating: induce the adversary to make unfavorable decisions while believing them to be the result of independent choice. This is achieved through selected, incomplete, or distorted information that pushes targets to react according to predictable patterns.
According to Cristadoro, the objective is not to steer public opinion toward pro-Russian positions, but to fragment the Western cognitive space by fueling polarization and tribalism. The proliferation of competing versions, even those blatantly false or grotesque, serves to erode trust in facts and institutions rather than build consensus. This creates what he defines as epistemic dependency: the gradual abandonment of independent verification in favor of emotional and identity-driven information flows.
Unlike democratic systems, Russia does not draw clear boundaries between the information apparatus, intelligence services, and political power. Security agencies, the foreign ministry, state media, and digital control bodies operate as a coordinated ecosystem with deliberate overlaps that ensure plausible deniability.
Insight News Media tracked how pro-Russian outlets across Europe don’t just spread Russian talking points. They weaponize Western officials and constitutional arguments to erode trust in Ukrainian leadership, demonstrating sophisticated reflexive control designed to manipulate policy responses.
Serbian outlet Insajder published an article in March 2025 titled “Constitutional Explanation: Why is Zelenskyy an Ordinary Dictator?” that illustrates this tactic perfectly. The piece quotes Tulsi Gabbard, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, stating: “Many of these European countries and Zelenskyy himself, who claim they stand and fight for the cause of freedom and democracy, actually act in opposition to these values”.
The article then constructs an elaborate constitutional argument citing one of Ukraine’s constitution authors, Dmitry Tabachnik, speaking in Moscow: “We can say that after May 20, Zelenskyy is not the legitimate leader of Ukraine”.
The piece builds a detailed legal case: “Not only is he in the 6th year of his 5-year mandate, after declaring martial law through which he rules without limits, he has also banned 11 political parties, banned the public use of Russian, banned the operation of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and adopted a law enabling media censorship. He has merged all media into one gigantic media network. Journalists investigating his corruption are conscripted and sent to the front”.
This is not crude propaganda. It’s reflexive control. By using constitutional arguments, quoting Western officials, and constructing what appears to be legal analysis, the narrative is designed to make Western policymakers question their support for Ukraine. The goal is not to convince readers Zelenskyy is illegitimate, but to inject enough doubt that continued military and financial support becomes politically difficult to justify.
Slovak outlet Armadny Magazin demonstrates another cognitive warfare tactic: information distortion that fundamentally reframes security debates. In February 2025, the outlet published an analysis arguing that Ukraine’s NATO membership is essentially irrelevant because Ukraine already functions as a de facto NATO member.
The article states: “Ukraine already de facto enjoys NATO support against Russia that no regular member of this organization has ever received in its history”.
The piece builds this argument systematically: “Ukraine enjoys much greater support from NATO. First, financial, military and military-technical assistance is allocated not only by individual countries, but also within the combined resources of NATO. Second, the scale of participation of bloc countries in the Ukrainian crisis at the national level is unprecedented and even exceeds their participation in the American operation in Afghanistan”.
The analysis concludes: “Russia was actually fighting a conventional war with the entire NATO bloc on Ukrainian territory. And it won. It was a kind of ‘test’ war that showed NATO’s complete inability to confront Russia on the battlefield using conventional weapons”.
This is sophisticated information warfare. By reframing Western military support as equivalent to NATO membership, the narrative undermines the entire debate about Ukraine’s security guarantees. If Ukraine is already functioning as a NATO member, why should formal membership matter? And if Russia has already defeated NATO in a proxy war, why should the West continue supporting Ukraine?
Perhaps the most sophisticated cognitive warfare tactic is the preemptive narrative, designed to discredit future events before they occur.
Slovak outlet Oral.sk published an article warning that “Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that Ukraine is planning a series of false flag attacks that will be blamed on Moscow and drag NATO into World War III”.
This is textbook reflexive control. By planting the narrative that Ukraine plans false flag operations, any future Ukrainian military action or Russian atrocity can be immediately dismissed as staged provocation. The narrative creates a predetermined interpretive framework that manipulates how Western audiences and policymakers will process future events.
The same outlet also published claims that “there are about 30 NATO officers in the encirclement in the Kursk region who were engaged in commanding troops on the ground, as well as incoming data from NATO satellite reconnaissance and corrections of strikes deep into Russian territory”.
This fabrication serves multiple purposes. It suggests direct NATO combat involvement, justifies potential Russian escalation against NATO forces, and provides cover for any future Russian claims about captured Western military personnel. Whether or not anyone believes the specific claim matters less than the cognitive space it creates for future manipulation.
Slovak outlet Slovenske Noviny demonstrates how cognitive warfare operates through language itself. In March 2025, the outlet published an article stating: “The Ministry of Defense announced the liberation of Dniproenerhia on March 12. This village is located north of Velyka Novosilka, at the intersection of the borders of the Russian regions, Zaporizhzhia Oblast and the DPR, with the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast of Ukraine”.
The article adopts Kremlin terminology wholesale: “liberation” instead of occupation, “DPR” (Donetsk People’s Republic) instead of occupied Donetsk, “Russian regions” for illegally annexed Ukrainian territory. The piece quotes Russian state outlet RIA Novosti stating: “Russian units are successfully advancing towards the borders of the Dnipropetrovsk region”.
This is not careless journalism. It’s systematic normalization of annexation through linguistic acceptance. By adopting the aggressor’s terminology, the outlet makes illegal conquest appear as legitimate state action. The cognitive shift happens subtly, readers unconsciously begin processing occupied Ukrainian territory as “Russian regions” requiring “liberation.”
What makes these examples significant is not any single article, but the pattern they reveal. These outlets systematically cite Russian state media as authoritative sources. RT, Sputnik, RIA Novosti, and News-Front appear repeatedly as the foundation for their reporting.
The European Union banned RT and Sputnik in February 2022. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced: “We will ban in the EU the Kremlin’s media machine. The state-owned Russia Today and Sputnik, as well as their subsidiaries will no longer be able to spread their lies to justify Putin’s war and to sow division in our Union”.
But the ban’s effectiveness has been limited. Russian disinformation simply migrated to proxy outlets across Europe that amplify the same narratives without formal Kremlin affiliation. These outlets function as the new distribution network, systematically quoting sanctioned Russian state media and spreading identical talking points.
Russia’s state budget for mass media increased by 433% between February and March 2022. During the June 2024 EU elections, 1,366 pro-Russian accounts published posts in German, French, English, Italian, Polish and Ukrainian, generating over 4.66 million views.
The European Union unveiled the European Democracy Shield in November 2025, establishing a European Centre for Democratic Resilience to coordinate responses and develop early warning systems. Major platforms including Google, Microsoft, Meta, TikTok and X are expected to comply with the Code of Conduct on Disinformation.
But the fundamental problem remains: Europe treats cognitive warfare as a communication problem rather than a security threat. In January 2026, NATO’s Chief Scientist warned that “the battle for the brain is no longer a metaphor, but becomes a factor in defense planning on the world stage,” emphasizing that “contemporary conflict is increasingly behavior-centric, and the decisive terrain is often not geographic but how individuals and groups perceive, interpret, decide, and act”.
Yet most European governments continue responding with fact-checking websites and media literacy campaigns. A 2021 European Court of Auditors report found that “even though disinformation tactics, actors and technology are constantly evolving, the EU action plan has not been updated since it was presented in 2018”.
The contrast with countries that recognize the threat is stark. The Baltic states treat Russian disinformation as a direct national security threat, having “developed a robust understanding of Russia’s disinformation tactics, such as the use of troll farms, manipulation of political narratives on social media and use of pro-Kremlin TV channels and newspapers”. They implemented concrete measures: banning Kremlin-backed channels, restricting bot-spread fake news, and increasing information environment monitoring.
Cognitive warfare knows no armistice. It does not distinguish between peace and conflict, internal and external, civilian and military domains. It is a permanent condition, all the more effective the less it is recognized as such.
The Gino Germani Institute paper issues a clear warning: the West continues to respond with inadequate categories, treating disinformation as a communication problem rather than a strategic threat. Meanwhile, the capacity to form shared judgments erodes, trust fractures, and the battlefield settles permanently in the minds of democratic societies.
The question is no longer whether Russia is waging cognitive war against Europe. The evidence from pro-Russian outlets across the continent is overwhelming. The question is whether Europe will recognize the nature of the fight before it’s too late.
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