The most common mistake in interpreting Russia’s actions against the West is to keep calling them propaganda. Propaganda implies a message—an ideological content meant to be transmitted. Contemporary Russian strategy, by contrast, works through subtraction, dissolving the very possibility of judgment.
Aktivnye meropriyátiya. This is the terrain on which the Kremlin’s cognitive warfare unfolds: a coherent set of doctrines, practices, and instruments rooted in Soviet active measures and now fully expressed in hybrid warfare against Western societies.
- It is on this same terrain that the paper authored by General Nicola Cristadoro and published by the Gino Germani Institute is structured.
From “active measures” to the destabilization of perception. During the Cold War, the KGB defined aktivnye meropriyatiya, the study recalls, as clandestine operations aimed at influencing political life, foreign policy, and decision-making processes in target countries.
- As Yuri Bezmenov explained in the 1980s, more than 80% of resources were devoted to ideological subversion, with the goal of distorting perceptions of reality to the point where any rational conclusion became impossible.
- That paradigm was never abandoned; it was updated. While Soviet propaganda was rigidly ideological and selective, contemporary Russian information warfare is fluid, contradictory, and adaptive. It does not seek adherence; it induces confusion.
The crowd as a strategic target. Russian cognitive warfare draws heavily on classic theories of mass psychology. As early as the late nineteenth century, Gustave Le Bon described the crowd as an emotional entity, incapable of critical autonomy and inclined to delegation. In a digital ecosystem dominated by algorithms and micro-narratives, that vulnerability is amplified.
- According to Cristadoro, the objective is not to steer public opinion toward pro-Russian positions, but to fragment the Western cognitive space by fueling polarization, tribalism, and fan-like dynamics. The proliferation of competing versions—even those that are blatantly false or grotesque—serves to erode trust in facts and institutions, not to build consensus.
Reflexive control: deciding for the adversary. At the doctrinal core of this strategy, the Germani Institute paper explains, lies reflexive control, a concept developed by Soviet military thought and refined in the post-Soviet era.
- The principle is to induce the adversary to make unfavorable decisions while believing them to be the result of independent choice. This is achieved through selected, incomplete, or distorted information.
- The target is pushed to react according to predictable patterns. In this sense, information becomes a weapon in its own right, capable of producing strategic effects without resorting to kinetic force.
Organized chaos and plausible deniability. Unlike democratic systems, Cristadoro notes, Russia does not draw clear boundaries between the information apparatus, intelligence services, and political power.
- The FSB, GRU, SVR, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, state media, and digital control bodies operate as a coordinated ecosystem, with deliberate overlaps that ensure redundancy and plausible deniability.
- The use of proxies, informal militias, hacker units, and disinformation campaigns allows the Kremlin to strike without claiming responsibility.
- When attribution becomes unavoidable, the response is not denial but inversion: those who expose interference are accused of hysteria, Russophobia, or manipulation.
Geopolitical trolling. A distinctive feature of the most recent phase is the deliberate use of the grotesque. Artificially generated videos, openly caricatural narratives, content that does not even pretend to be credible—all aimed at normalizing falsehood.
- This form of geopolitical trolling creates habituation, lowers cognitive defenses, and contributes to what Cristadoro defines as “epistemic dependency”: the gradual abandonment of independent verification in favor of emotional and identity-driven information flows.
A war without end. The Germani Institute paper ultimately issues a warning. Cognitive warfare knows no armistice. It does not distinguish between peace and conflict, internal and external, civilian and military domains. It is a permanent condition, all the more effective the less it is recognized as such.
- The West continues to respond with inadequate categories, treating disinformation as a communication problem rather than a strategic threat.
- Meanwhile, the capacity to form shared judgments erodes, trust fractures, and the battlefield settles permanently in the minds of democratic societies.
