Lessons from Ukraine on Cognitive Warfare: Journal of Strategic Security
In a 2025 report for the Journal of Strategic Security titled “Surveying New Battlegrounds: Ukraine and the Future of Cognitive Warfare,” authors Dr. Chad M. Briggs and Anita Tusor contend that modern conflict increasingly targets social perception. The report analyses the war in Ukraine to illustrate the expanding role of cognitive warfare in shaping beliefs, manipulating narratives, and weakening social cohesion to influence strategic decision making, both in the lead-up to and during conflict.
Russia’s Playbook
Russia has employed a mix of tools to influence the cognitive domain, including cyber operations, disinformation campaigns, private military companies, criminal networks, and even religious institutions such as the Russian Orthodox Church. The Russian strategy draws on longstanding concepts like maskirovka and reflexive control to create confusion, fragment communities, and pressure adversaries into making decisions favorable to Moscow.
Ukraine’s Response
Ukraine’s experience shows that societies can resist cognitive warfare with coherent strategy. Government messaging, volunteer cyber networks, and coordinated information campaigns have helped counter Russian narratives and maintain domestic resilience. Civil society mobilization, including the volunteer “IT Army,” have reinforced the government’s ability to shape the narrative of the war at home and abroad.
China’s Lessons
For its part, Beijing emphasizes persuasion, narrative dominance, and gradual pressure rather than the disruptive “firehose” style used by Russia. Chinese campaigns seek to normalize political outcomes and shape perceptions long before open conflict begins.
Why It Matters
States increasingly compete by working to shape perception and targeting the resilience of societies, most often through the soft-underbelly of digital networks The central lesson for Western governments is put best by Briggs and Tusor: “For some key global actors, the most relevant battlespace has moved from physical fields into the hearts and minds of a population.” It is time for the U.S. and its allies to catch on.
While You’re At It:
Read “Governing Cognitive Warfare at Ecosystem Speed: Why America Can’t Organize for Influence—and What It Takes to Compete” for a perspective on how the U.S. lacks not the capabilities for effective cognitive warfare but institutions that can act with agility and coherence as the environment demands. It is, as authors Col. John Wilcox and Maj. Ryan Walters put it, “ an argument for aligning authority, legitimacy, and action before adversaries define reality.”
We also recommend you read Scott Reisher’s essay “Cognitive Warfare and the Indo-Pacific,” a republished piece from the Irregular Warfare Initiative, which advocates that the U.S. and its allies construct a partner-enabled cognitive warfare framework in order to compete against the PRC in shaping perception in the region.
