Don't get hacked

Invisible Battle

It was a constant play by the Russian services, due to the fact that no evidence was always presented that specified laboratories in the designated countries had always existed. Reports on this subject are utilized to heat anti-American, anti-Natarian or anti-Western sentiments. At the same time, they are a tool for delegating the governments of circumstantial countries. intellectual mechanisms are utilized here to address concerns about biological weapons and to test them on humans. The subject is regularly recalled and serves to disinformation, manipulation and shaping moods and planet views. This is 1 of the manifestations of the cognitive war. And although it's a conflict that leaves no broken divisions and destroyed cities behind, its effects can be equally devastating.

As Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu erstwhile wrote, “a 100 victories in a 100 battles are not the highest of accomplishments. The real highest of achievements is beating the enemy army without a fight.” The key to success is to break the will of the enemy. This can be achieved by disrupting his perception, forcing him to adopt his own point of view and imposing a belief in the purposelessness of resistance. In another words, by messing with his head. The thought of Sun Tzu should be treated as the shortest explanation of cognitive war. This is simply a fresh kind of confrontation that goes beyond traditionally understood military operations. “Some people talk about it as hacking the human mind,” notes Dr hab. Agnieszka Szczygielska from the Military Department of the Academy of War Art, but adds: "It's more like taking control of cognitive processes in order to win the war before conventional fighting takes place.
Such a war on minds Russia leads with the West, the fundamental problem for the democratic planet is how to defend ourselves against specified actions.

How to destruct Your Adversary Morale

The main weapon in this conflict is information distributed through conventional media and social media, but it must be admitted that the emergence of digital platforms created a completely fresh situation. – Their users can build a network of connections at an unprecedented rate and run certain narratives. In addition, for many people, especially young people, they stay the only origin of cognition about the planet – explains Colonel Robert Reczkowski, Deputy manager of the Centre for Doctrines and Armed Forces Training. specified a recipient is peculiarly prone to manipulation.

The threat is besides that modern systems based on artificial intelligence (AI) not only facilitate the production of fabricated content, specified as deep fakes (e.g. fake films utilizing the image of real people), but besides aid carry out analytical work. They divide possible audiences into groups, make their intellectual and worldview profiles, indicate what content is most suitable for them. By being able to identify our weaknesses, the attack can become more precise. In this way the narratives needed by the manipulator are placed on the market.

Compared to conventional information war or intellectual cognitive war, or otherwise cognitive war, it is seen as a comprehensive kind of influence operation, as it is aimed at the most basic level – values shaping human actions. The issue is serious, and the papers created for NATO's needs include the issue of recognising the cognitive domain as another, fresh space of rivalry alongside the existing operational domains: land, sea, air, cyber and space.

Cognitive war can take on different faces, but the common denominator of all related actions remains the demolition of the opponent's morale. In the modern world, it is no longer limited to the army, for full societies become opposers. However, the concept of cognitive, hybrid, information and intellectual warfare must be delineated. – Cognitive war is about shaping views, beliefs and opinions in order to build in the state, society or nation a peculiar consciousness. In turn, the hybrid war is all actions on the border between the civilian and military spheres, aimed at achieving the political goal. It uses kinetics, economic, legal, information, psychological, actions in cyberspace, although there are besides elements of cognitive activities here," explains Agnieszka Szczygielska.

The cognitive war can so be part of a hybrid war, but it can besides be a separate domain, and action is carried out independently, utilizing various tools and ways. These include information, intellectual and cyberspace operations. Dr. Szczygielska points out that the erstwhile relate primarily to the control of information, to its flow and transmission. The latter, in turn, are focused on influencing emotions, and cyberspace is an area that all spheres connect. In addition, information and intellectual operations are usually carried out on an individual, emotional and often-accident level, and cognitive warfare concerns collective cognitive schemes and is taking place in the long term. Often, actions on her behalf begin a fewer years before the event to program the way the society thinks. The long-term aspect is besides highlighted by Kamil Basaj, an expert from Cyberspace defence Army Command: – These are multilevel operations that are not planned in short-term cycles. “As he points out, analyses of Russian papers and operations propose that the processes of assessing the effectiveness of specified operations are recorded in ten-year cycles. An example of the case with alleged laboratories may propose that any strands of action can be implemented for decades.

Words shoot

Cognitive operations are 1 of the key elements of the war of the fresh type. The same 1 that General Walerij Gierasimov, president of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, spoke of 12 years ago. – At the Moscow Military Sciences Academy he mentioned the function of non-kinetic and kinetic factors in the conduct of modern war activities. The proportion between them was 4 to one. Only 2 years later, then, the Russian defence minister Sergei Szojgu conquered the meaning of the former, saying, “The words besides shoot” – reminds Colonel Reczkowski. At the time, Russia systematically expanded and strengthened the device liable for intellectual and information operations. Spending on this goal began to skyrocket before the invasion of Georgia in 2008. After 14 years, they reached $1.5 billion, which means they were 30% higher than a decade earlier.

The Center for east Studies states that only in the first 4th of 2022, erstwhile Russian tanks crossed the border with Ukraine, the state media received 200% more money for their operations than a year earlier. The biggest beneficiary of the change was the RT channel (formerly Russia Today), whose task is to transfer the Kremlin propaganda beyond the borders of Russia. A stream of money flows to news agencies Tass and Sputnik.

Politicians, diplomats, representatives of technological centres, affiliated with the Kremlin of the foundation, bloggers and even Orthodox church clergy are besides active in the Russian narrative. The net plays a peculiar function here. Russia created a troll factory, and the people employed in it initiate and fuel wars in social media in the West all day. They let fake news into the network, through decently selected comments they initiate and fuel worldview wars, trying to deepen existing divisions in societies. Schemes of specified activities are developed in military centres. In the army itself, there is besides an expansion of structures designed to lead a cognitive war. “In the spring of 2025, a fresh military specialty was created in Russia – information confrontation, and peculiar subdivisions were created in military units prepared for conducting the information and intellectual battle,” said Colonel Reczkowski.

One example of Russian disinformation activities is Operation Döppelganger (with a German double). The starting point was to make a bot network on the X portal. – Accounts were created in different parts of the world. They initially published information on cryptocurrency. At the right time they switched to Polish, pretending to be afraid citizens – explains Prof. Dariusz Jemielniak from the Department of Management at the Kozminski Academy Network Society. The entries concerned, among others, the excessive engagement of Poland in the interests of the EU or the disaster which the presence of Ukrainian immigrants would bring to the country. The post was accompanied by a link referring to Facebook articles published under the name “Politics” or Polish Radio.

Another example of an extended operation in fresh months is the case Russian drones that flew into Poland from the east at night from 9 to 10 September. The attack was not limited to airspace. As the military knocked down more unmanned people, there was an animated disinformation run online. According to the Minister of Digitalization Krzysztof Gawkowski, many Russian bots were activated before dawn. – The number of entries and comments spreading prokremlów narratives on that day increased 3 times, says Prof. Jemielniak. He dominated the message that the attack of drones was an Ukrainian provocation which aims to drag Poland and NATO into war with Russia. Alleged evidence: device scope – besides tiny to be able to take off from Russian territory. no of the supporters of this thesis were afraid that unmanned – as the radar data indicated – mostly flew from Belarus...

Eventually, Poland came out of this clash with a defensive hand. Representatives of the government and the president agreed that Russia was behind the attack, and its activity is simply a threat to Poland's interests. According to the calculations of the European Analyst Collective Res Futura in the first days after the attack, this conviction supported 41% of users of the most popular social networks. Almost 24% spoke Kremlin... – Unfortunately, interior actors played a negative function here. And it's not just an impact agent. People whose relationships with Russia were hard to show sometimes reached after parallel narratives with the Kremlowskis, says Dr. Michał Marek, Head of the External Threat Analysis squad in NASK. Russia's work for the raid was questioned by any politicians and niche media. The full operation was utilized to make information sound and smuggling, which are besides a permanent axis in Russian propaganda and information activities: to remove Russia's work for what is happening, and to place it on its main opponent: Ukraine.

Lie Repeated a 1000 times

– The basic presumption of russian propaganda specialists was to say that in rule the fact does not exist. alternatively of it, there is only an thought of the planet in people's minds. It is simply a product of cognitive, cognitive process, explains Kamil Basaj. Knowing the mechanics of information processing in the human mind, which has besides been studied for many years, The Soviets have come to conclusions that have become the basis for planning manipulation operations. – They recognized that all man and all social group has their own individual image of the planet that can be described and counted. This can make a model of how a social group perceives the world. russian researchers called it a model of subjectivism, says DKWOC expert.

The Soviets felt that the cognitive process could be permanently disrupted by information actions, and tested various ways of manipulating it. “It was about the ability to classify deceptive and disinformation operations in specified a way that ready-made models of action could be created,” said Kamil Basaj. 1 more aspect is highlighted: the Soviets have noticed that the cognitive process in human minds is someway flawed. – If the human brain is subjected to continuous information, controlled and controlled, the resources of cognition and data which it is not aware of all day are saturated with this effect. The more varied information of a manipulative nature, the greater the sensitivity of the brain to making decisions that are incorrect from a rational, yet consistent, perspective. This is in a sense a scientific, cognitive depiction of a very common slogan, which says that a lie repeated a 1000 times becomes actual – the expert concludes. This means that filling the human head with information that disrupts the process of inference increases the ability of the opponent to influence. It besides weakens the reaction to Russian provocations. Repeated non-standard situations and violations lead to normalisation and tamement, thus blurring the boundary between the act of aggression and the incident. – This is simply a classical cognitive war arsenal tactic, due to the fact that this is not about physical attack. This can be regarded as a weapon of ambiguity, due to the fact that different interpretations of phenomena, events and situations occur," explains Agnieszka Szczygielska.

He plays with emotion

The Russians choose the ways of their communicative according to the country that was targeted. – In Poland, Russian propaganda finds susceptible ground in issues where Polish society is divided. This applies peculiarly to relations with Ukraine and attitudes towards migrants," explains Prof. Jemielniak. Kamil Basaj, on the another hand, emphasizes that Russian misinformation is very frequently utilizing strong emotions, which are a binding component of attention and expanding the efficiency of the message. And since fear is 1 of the strongest emotions, it is the 1 most used. “So the Russians endanger atomic destruction, war, provocation, retaliation,” says the expert. At the same time, they are building a image of their country, which supposedly must constantly defend itself against alien aggression. In this way, they force Western societies, including Poland, to wonder how far they can go in shaping their defence policy, so as not to exposure themselves to alleged retaliation. The consequence is the transfer of work from aggressor to a victim, due to the fact that the states that experienced Russian provocations must justify their actions.

By constantly provoking and shifting the boundaries of what is acceptable, there is simply a feeling of uncertainty in Western societies and weakening assurance in NATO, the European Union or the governments of their own countries. The answer to continuing violations of global order is, for example, protests, concerns, etc., alternatively than concrete actions. – This makes emotions, fear, uncertainty or anger towards “the passiveness of the West”. In this way, it fights and divides society, polarizes attitudes, prefers utmost solutions, depreciates actual authorities and starts false narratives – concludes Dr. Szczygielska.

It is easy under specified conditions to spread toxic rhetoric, introduce harmful thesis, corrupt the image of people, countries. Russia does not make divisions in societies undergoing cognitive operations, but these divisions exploit and deepen. – Cognitive actions are like a catalyst that brings out everything that antagonizes and polarizes us – the expert points out. The sowing of doubts or questioning of trust in state and global institutions serves to weaken social cohesion and confusion, and this is easy to exploit, with its own solutions and concepts – for example, in relation to who is liable for circumstantial acts of aggression.

Knowledge of Arms

Fighting Russian disinformation and propaganda is difficult. For example, in Western democracies, 1 of the fundamental values is freedom of speech and the media is not controlled by the state. – While it is possible to block Russian channels that sow misinformation, it is hard to imagine that the services take control of social networks managed by large techs – admits Colonel Reczkowski. But the West is not helpless. It does not gotta focus solely on minimising the effects of Russian strikes. At NATO level, structures are being developed for the conduct of the cognitive war, but the scope and manner of their operation is classified. – akin actions are besides carried out in our armed forces. Nevertheless, the strategy remains somewhat dispersed and needs to be centralised, even in terms of achieving a synergistic effect between military and civilian elements," Reczkowski points out.

In the fight against disinformation, modern technology is besides useful. – utilizing device learning algorithms, you can analyse the content of posts in social media and articles to detect these misleading or false ones – explains Prof. Jemielniak. And Dr. Michał Marek from NASK adds that in order to limit the dissemination of Russian disinformation, it is worth considering the introduction of legal regulations, e.g. to include in the Criminal Code the word "agent of influence" and to penalise the deliberate dissemination of misinformation. In Western countries, stigmatizing statements is risky, due to the fact that it automatically implies association with censorship. Only that freedom of speech, as the experts powerfully emphasize, cannot mean the right to make lies that, in addition, hit the foundations of society and the state. The key to triumph in this war is education. We request to strengthen social resilience. Schools should learn how to verify information in reliable sources. At the state level, make a coordinated communication strategy and rebuild assurance in public institutions – emphasises the expert, Dr Marek.
Western societies have faced a challenge they have never faced before. All indications propose that Russia's actions in the field of cognitive warfare will not be diminished any time soon. The decision-makers in the Kremlin are aware that they are militaryly weaker than NATO, so they will do anything to weaken the West with another methods. Why? possibly it's a year-long introduction to a classical military operation. Or possibly the Russians are just counting on them to take control of Central-Eastern Europe through impact operations. That by weakening the mechanisms of democracy, they would be able to pave the way for governments that would be willing to implement pro-Kremlin policy. There are many possible solutions. But 1 thing remains: the conflict for hearts and minds continues.