Our Association’s experts always try not only to provide assessments of the current situation, but also to focus on identifying critical threats to the future.
Therefore, ARC expert Eduard Pleshko will consider Russia’s conduct of the so-called mental or cognitive warfare and the features of exercising such influence on the territory of occupied Crimea.
It is worth noting that an important event was the appearance in January 2026 of the report of the NATO Chief Scientist for 2025 on cognitive warfare, which officially states that modern conflicts have entered a new phase, which NATO reached after several years of internal research, experiments and analysis of real conflicts.
The report actually summarizes previous discussions on the conduct of cognitive warfare, defining it not as a new name for information and psychological operations or “PSYOPS with better tools”, but leads to the recognition and implementation of the Cognitive Domain, a new operational environment simultaneously with actions on land, sea, in the air, space, cyberspace and in the electromagnetic spectrum.
That is, the modern model of armed conflicts is much more an action aimed at the behavior of individuals (behavior-centric) participating in the conflict, even outside the security and defense forces. It is about a systemic impact on thinking processes in which information is only one of the elements, not the ultimate goal.
In particular, in a state of information overload, a person loses up to 30-40% of the ability to critically analyze. This means that the key thing is not the content of messages, but their quantity, rhythm and emotional coloring. Instead of convincing, the enemy creates an environment of constant noise, where thinking shifts to a simplified mode: “friends – enemies”, “betrayal – victory”, “all or nothing”.
Human attention is limited, the average concentration time in the digital environment has decreased from about 12 seconds twenty years ago to less than 8 seconds today. This makes people especially vulnerable to emotional and simplified narratives. Modern technologies and algorithms only optimize the delivery of such narratives. They do not change human nature, but they allow for faster, more accurate and less costly influence.
In 2024, Russia officially separated cognitive sciences into a special scientific field and is actively ensuring their integration into the Russian military-analytical complex, which allows the Kremlin to put cognitive modeling at the service of the aggressor’s state geopolitical strategy.
Russian “science” has transferred cognitive warfare from the category of “humanitarian technologies” to the plane of an engineering discipline. The enemy’s society is viewed as a complex cybernetic system. Through cognitive modeling, the enemy is trying to find critical points of vulnerability (points of division) in this system in order to use minimal informational and psychological impulses to introduce it into a state of uncontrolled chaos.
In essence, they seek to automate the process of mental destruction of states without the use of exclusively military force.
From a study of how Russian scientists and military analysts, in particular representatives of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Military Academy of the General Staff, the Kurchatov Institute and Moscow State University, conceptualize cognitive warfare and use modern modeling, the following can be seen.
If classical information warfare is waged for control over data transmission channels and message content (cybersecurity, fake news, disinformation), then cognitive warfare is aimed directly at the algorithms of human thinking, perception, emotions, and decision-making.
Researchers of the aggressor even distinguish three basic levels of damage.
Firstly, it is biological, in particular neurophysiological, with an impact on biochemical processes in the brain, such as stress, exhaustion, sleep deprivation, to reduce critical thinking.
Secondly, it is psychological, when emotional triggers are used, namely, fear, panic, guilt, ultra-patriotism, or ultra-betrayal.
Thirdly, the sociocultural (mental) one, where work is being done to destroy basic semantic constructs, historical memory, language and identity, is what the aggressor’s defense minister’s advisor Andrei Ilnitsky and figures associated with him call “mental warfare”.
The recent investigation by OCCRP, Delfi Estonia, and Le Monde into the leak of Kremlin documents, in particular, the activities of the Social Design Agency (SDA), is interesting, where we can see a clear paradigm shift in the Russian special services with the transition from classic propaganda to “cognitive strikes”.
The SDA documents, which were coordinated directly by the Russian presidential administration, in particular Sergey Kiriyenko and curator Sofia Zakharova, demonstrate that Russia has moved to an industrial, industrial conveyor belt of perception management, and Russian methodologists have systematized the tools of influence, dividing them into several key technologies.
One of the key aspects of cognitive warfare is the creation of such dense and contradictory information noise that the target of the attack (an individual or society) loses the ability to distinguish truth from manipulation.
The ultimate goal of this technology is not to convince of its “truth”, but to achieve a state of confusion (epistemic confusion), in which a person ceases to distinguish between truth and manipulation, and ultimately gives up trying to figure it out, falling into a state of information consumption. This leads to apathy, paralysis of the will and refusal to analyze or radicalization, and both states are beneficial to the enemy.
The SDA reports do not just include viewing figures, as in classic propaganda, but indicators of “attitude change”, the dynamics of comments under posts, the level of polarization of the discussion and the percentage of decline in support for Ukraine among target audiences.
The enemy does not reject the legacy of the Soviet school of military methodology of Vladimir Lefebvre, known as reflexive control, the essence of which is to transmit such information that forces one to independently and voluntarily make a decision that is advantageous to the enemy in advance.
Among the new technologies are the management of emotional resonance, the so-called artificial polarization, the identification and creation of real contradictions in the enemy’s society, for example, language issues, mobilization, economic difficulties, conflicts between the political and military leadership, and their artificial feeding through networks of bots and opinion leaders in order to radicalize the parties to the conflict, making social consensus impossible.
The opponent also considers the method of semantic privatization and deconstruction of long-term influence to be very important, aimed at rewriting history, erasing national identity in the occupied territories and substituting concepts, for example, presenting aggression as “defense”, occupation as “liberation”.
Here, they proceed from the fact that in order to consolidate a new cognitive construct in the masses, a continuous 40-day cycle of broadcasting the same narrative is necessary.
Using computer modeling, the so-called impulse processes are calculated, in particular, “what will happen to the system of public sentiment in Ukraine if 3 large-scale disinformation campaigns (impulses in the concept of “panic”) are launched simultaneously against the backdrop of an energy crisis?” The system calculates the dynamics of the development of chaos several steps ahead.
Generative testing of narratives is actively carried out, when neural networks model which type of content (video, text, meme) will cause the maximum emotional response (anger, despair) in a specific audience.
Artificial intelligence and large language models (LLM) are used for cognitive mapping of target audiences with automatic analysis of millions of posts in social networks through monitoring systems such as “Kribrum” or “Katyusha”. This allows to create digital “psychotypes” of individual regions or social groups, including Ukraine or Western countries.
It is easy to see that if in the West Russian cognitive strikes are aimed at destabilization and chaos, then in the territories that Russia physically holds (occupied Crimea, Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia), this technology has the opposite, but even more destructive goal – total cognitive assimilation, deconstruction of identity, and forced loyalty.
The leak of Russian secret files, published in May 2026, confirms that Russia is no longer waging a classic information war, it is waging a war for mental modeling.
In the West, agents like Sofia Zakharova or Ilya Gambashidze are forced to act “more subtly”, using proxy groups and artificial intelligence to create the illusion of internal division, but in the occupied territories and in unrecognized republics, the Kremlin has a monopoly on violence. This allows it to combine cognitive technologies with administrative and physical terror.
In post-Soviet countries, economic-cognitive blackmail is used, during which the so-called “financial assistance” from Russia is presented not as economic relations, but as “salvation from genocide”, which forms a syndrome of learned helplessness in the population, when society loses faith in its ability to live independently outside the Russian protectorate.
Regarding Ukraine, we can consider a demonstrative information campaign regarding the activities of the mobilization management system during martial law. Initially, the campaign was conducted using the method of direct physical influence, when buildings were set on fire in the territory controlled by Ukraine.
But later, characteristic events occurred with fires in military registration and enlistment offices in Russia, and even in unrecognized Transnistria, two arson attacks were recorded. This situation forced the Russian organizers of such actions to change the format of conducting their own special operations.
Regarding Crimea, an evolution is visible from the “information assault” in 2014 to the “cognitive prosthetics” in 2026.
It is known that Russian special services use algorithms similar to those developed by the SDA.
Among the practical developments is the method of “horizontal fatigue” for constant, dosed maintenance of the population in a state of alarm with news about air defense, the closure of the Crimean bridge, threats of punishment for activity in social networks, etc. Prolonged stress blocks critical thinking at the level of brain physiology due to cortisol depletion. A person loses the ability to long-term planning and strives for only one thing – stability at any cost, which preserves loyalty to the occupation regime.
At the same time, continuous parsing continues, that is, automated collection of Crimean publics, chats and comments in all social networks. Artificial intelligence builds fuzzy cognitive maps of Crimean cities, determining, for example, the index of social tension by the main fears – shortage of water, fuel, fear of arrival; localization of centers of potential pro-Ukrainian underground by indirect linguistic markers in the network.
In general, the main trend of modernity is the maximum automation of influence, when the Russian occupation machine seeks to make Crimean residents defend Russian narratives not because they are forced by an automatic machine gun, but because their thinking architecture has been artificially rebuilt and they are simply unable to imagine a different reality.
Let us try to systematize the systemic cognitive influence of the aggressor on the population of occupied Crimea and other regions held by it, formed on the basis of modern research on neuropolitics, cognitive security and sociology of totalitarian systems.
In particular, it is clearly visible how Russia applies the concept of “epistemic siege”, that is, complete control not only over sources of information, but also over the criteria for determining truth.
Firstly, it is the militarization of childhood as a tool for “reflashing” neural networks (neuro-engineering).
Scientific research in the field of cognitive psychology proves that critical thinking is most difficult to deform if it is formed on the basis of a stable basic identity. In Crimea, Russia targeted children through the “Youth Army”, the “Movement of the First”, and cadet classes.
The main method is emotional anchoring through oath rituals, wearing uniforms, the cult of weapons, etc., combined with isolation from alternative history.
Another example of this method is the formula: “Crimea was never Ukraine, it was Khrushchev’s historical mistake”. The first information laid down in childhood is imposed on schoolchildren and students, which serves as a cognitive anchor that is extremely difficult for an adult to rationally refute.
The main result is seen as the formation of a persistent cognitive dissonance, when parents’ memories of Ukraine come into conflict with the daily glorification of Russia at school. The child is forced to choose a psychologically safer option, such as conformism and acceptance of the imposed “image of the enemy” (Ukraine and the West).
Secondly, the concept of the “Trojan Horse” of memory (symbolic attack) is actively used.
The main method is to replace the essence of historical phenomena, for example, the deportation of Crimean Tatars in 1944 is marginalized or justified by “military necessity”, instead an artificial myth is created about Crimea as a “primitively Russian baptismal font”.
The main result is predicted to be the cognitive displacement of autochthonous identity – Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar. A person is forced to think with the imposed category “a Crimean is a subspecies of a Russian”.
Thirdly, intensive information deprivation and the effect of the “illusion of truth” by blocking more than a hundred Ukrainian and independent media, jamming the broadcast signal, which create an information vacuum with the simultaneous imposition of quasi-international measures of supposedly world recognition, which should blur the international legal assessment of the previous aggression.
Despite the previously recognized international humanitarian crime of conscripting the population of the occupied territories into military service, this practice has clearly become a system in the occupied territories of Ukraine, including Crimea.
Here, the method of influence is the psychological phenomenon of the illusion of truth (illusion-of-truth effect), which uses a psychological attitude, when a person is inclined to believe the statement that he hears most often, even if he was initially skeptical about it.
The constant repetition of theses about “protection from the Nazis” and “prosperity in Russia” against the background of the physical impossibility of verifying the information, in particular due to the fear of criminal prosecution for “discrediting the army” changes the architecture of perception of reality.
As a result, the population of the occupied territories is subjected to a violent “identity lobotomy,” where the cognitive stability of citizens is destroyed through isolation, fear, and targeted work with children, which will require decades of de-occupation not only of space but also of the human mind.
At the same time, cognitive warfare should not be perceived in a simplified way, as a type of information or propaganda activity, and requires taking into account its conduct by the aggressor as a component of other forms of conducting an armed conflict, including cyberwar, legal war, etc.
