From Information to Cognition: Mental Warfare from the Russian Perspective

From the 2010s onwards, both in the West and in Russia, there has been a growing debate about the effects of information warfare and how to protect against them. The challenges as well as the opportunities presented by technological advances are also reflected in the relations between states and how malicious parties exploit information to exert their influence. Ideological proclamations and the large-scale dissemination of propaganda have become outdated, as efforts to influence democratic societies have increasingly shifted to social media platforms, especially those using algorithms and microtargeting. As communication channels fragment the public discourse into ever smaller bubbles and content personalised by algorithms, malicious information-based influence is also shifting from maximum coverage to new channels of influence, where disinformation can be more precisely targeted to elicit a desired response. It is no longer simply a question of achieving extensive coverage with destructive narratives and disseminating a particular world view, but of influencing the way individuals and communities think, process information and make decisions. In Russia, the term information-psychological warfare has been used to refer to this development, and from 2021 onwards also the term mental warfare, which is the focus of this report. As a concept, mental warfare is new to the discussion within Russia, and it is largely based on earlier concepts of information-psychological warfare, reflexive control and strategic deception, or maskirovka