Cognitive Warfare is Paralysis

Russia's Assault on Our Will to Act

A new report on Russia’s engagement in Cognitive Warfare lays out several scenes. For example: Somewhere in a European ministry, a diplomat rereads a memo: Ukraine is requesting longer-range missiles. The margin note warns of provocation. “Escalation,” it says in faint pencil. No one signs the decision. No one has to. The aid is delayed again. Not denied, just delayed. And somewhere in Moscow, a Russian analyst is ‘satisfied’. Another day gained, another mind held.

Russia’s cognitive warfare is not a campaign of persuasion. It is a doctrine of strategic parasitism, born from the gap between its superpower ambitions and its real-world limitations. It survives not by force but by insinuation, not by winning arguments but by infecting the assumptions that precede them. As Bugayova and Stepanenko make terrifyingly clear in their report: A Primer on Russian Cognitive Warfare, this is not a war for land. It is a war for the machinery of judgment, a long, patient siege against human will.

The strength of Russia’s approach is its exploitation of Western virtue. Our pluralism, our procedural caution, our habit of symmetrical reasoning, all become weapons when reflected back at us. This is the legacy of “reflexive control,” the Soviet strategy of not telling the enemy what to think but arranging the conditions so the enemy arrives at the desired conclusion themselves. As the ISW report puts it, the aim is to transfer “the bases for decision-making” to the adversary, making them unknowingly argue from Russian-defined premises.

“The Kremlin is not arguing with us. It is trying to enforce assertions about Russia’s manufactured portrayal of reality as the basis for our own discussions and then allow us to reason to conclusions that benefit the Kremlin.”

NATO debates how to avoid provocation; the Kremlin defines what provocation is. Western diplomats weigh whether Putin feels threatened; Russia has already inserted the premise that his feelings determine the rules.

It is a strategy that targets not belief but inertia. Russia doesn’t need us to embrace its narrative. It only needs us to believe that the truth is too murky, the consequences too vast, the motives too impure. The goal is not to win the argument, but to ensure the argument never ends, making inaction the default and most reasonable-seeming choice. This is not persuasion, it is the cultivation of ambiguity until action becomes impossible.

“The Kremlin has been seeking to portray Putin as an effective war leader. Putin has, in fact, been an ineffective war leader, failing to achieve nearly all of his stated military objectives well over three years into Russia’s war.”

“Russia is not weak, but it is weak relative to its goals. The Kremlin uses cognitive warfare to close gaps between its goals and its means.”

The examples are legion. In 2022, Bucha happens, a documented war crime, a massacre. And yet, Russia’s denials are not designed to convince. They are designed to linger, to delay, to muddy the field. In 2023, the Black Sea Grain Deal collapses. Russia’s attacks on Ukrainian ports are framed as reactions to Western escalation. The actual facts are less important than the tempo: the Kremlin moves quickly, asymmetrically, and with indifference to truth. The West, by contrast, moves with due process and internal memos.

This is a doctrine of non-domination. Russia doesn’t aim to control behavior by brute force. It aims to design the arena in which decisions happen. The battlefield is bureaucratic. The casualties are choices not taken, aid not delivered, coalitions not formed.

The report is brutal in its diagnosis of Western weakness. Our institutions are exquisitely vulnerable not because they are bad, but because they are slow and consensus-bound. We are still treating this as a policy debate. But Russia’s strategy is not a position to be engaged — it is a tactic to be disrupted. Every time we ask, “But what if we escalate?” we are already playing the Kremlin’s game. The war began the moment that question framed the conversation.

“The Kremlin needs its opponents to do less so that Moscow can achieve more of its goals.”

This is where Russia’s overperformance becomes even more dangerous than its actual strength. As the authors point out, Moscow is often failing, militarily, economically, diplomatically. And yet it performs invincibility. It constructs inevitability. It sells the future as fait accompli. It is not interested in winning cleanly. It is interested in making resistance appear futile.

Even more damning is the West’s tendency to treat Russian narratives as legitimate topics of conversation. The premise that Russia deserves a sphere of influence is not contested, it is discussed. The idea that Ukraine’s NATO accession was a threat to Russia is not rejected, it is weighed. This is not intellectual honesty. It is strategic surrender disguised as debate.

What’s needed is not better counter-narratives. It is the rejection of the frame altogether. The West must stop asking which of Russia’s stories are true. It must start refusing to inhabit Russia’s reality at all. The task is to deny the premises, to unseat the logic before it infects the policy.

This is not a call for propaganda. It is a call for decisiveness. Ukraine's drones in the Black Sea did more to shatter Russia’s blockade narrative than any communiqué. The incursion into Kursk Oblast exposed the hollowness of nuclear threats. Actions are the only rebuttal that cannot be spun. What's needed is not better counter-narratives, but a strategy of premise-shattering actions. The West must start creating physical realities that prove Russia’s stories as false. Force, when used strategically and ethically, is not the failure of diplomacy. It is its prerequisite.

“The purpose of the Kremlin’s cognitive warfare is to generate an alternative reality that allows Russia to win in the real world.”

The authors remind us that our governments must communicate effectively to the public, showing real instances of cognitive warfare and how the truth destroys those efforts:

“The West is best served by neutralizing Russian (and Iranian, North Korean, and Chinese) cognitive warfare efforts through highlighting them, working to reject the false premises they seek to create, and focusing on the real world situation rather than falling into the trap of operating intellectually within the artificial world cognitive warfare efforts seek to create.”

We are not in a contest of information. We are in a contest of imagination. Russia imagines a world where truth is contingent, where fact is optional, where power flows from ambiguity. And unless the West imagines something stronger, and acts accordingly, we will lose not because of what we believed, but because we hesitated to believe in anything at all.

Bugayova and Stepanenko have shown us the mechanism. The next move is up to the West. But make no mistake: not moving is a move, and it is the one the Kremlin prefers.

Stay curious

Colin