The war in people’s minds

Deterrence depends on a simple calculation: an adversary must believe that you have both the means and the resolve to strike where it hurts. Germany and Europe are building missiles, drones and cyberweapons because they understand that deterrence requires the ability to act. But in the struggle over what people believe and how they behave, the cognitive domain remains a blind spot.

The article argues that democracies have responded almost entirely on the defensive. They monitor the information space, debunk fake news and try to regulate social media, then treat that as the whole task. The crucial battlefield, however, is not only one’s own society. It is also the society of the attacker. The key question is not simply how effectively Russian narratives are filtered, but how well the machinery producing them is understood and influenced.

More than a decade ago, General Valery Gerasimov called for Russia to give nonmilitary methods roughly four times the weight of military means in order to win wars before a shot was fired. The article says Russia has built precisely such a machine in the information space.

Two methods illustrate how far it has developed. Bot farms, large networks of fake accounts increasingly operated with artificial intelligence, flood social media to create the appearance of consensus. Even more insidiously, AI chatbots can now draw on live online results. Thousands of identical false claims can therefore occupy the answer to a specific question about a politician, a battle or a sanction, leading users to Kremlin-aligned responses without their knowing the source.

The article says these techniques are used most intensively, and are most dangerous, before elections. Analyses from Romania, Moldova and Armenia have identified similar patterns involving narrative manipulation, cyberattacks and economic pressure. Before German state elections, Russia reportedly used social-media campaigns including Matryoshka and Storm-1516 to discredit established parties and benefit the AfD and BSW. Defending the home front remains necessary, the authors argue, but a purely reactive approach guarantees a game of catch-up, because every exposed operation is replaced by the next.