Russia’s most ambitious campaign against Europe is a fight over identity — over the instincts and self-image that shape how people interpret everything else. That argument runs through “Going Mental: Russia’s Cognitive War Against Europe,” the policy brief Sahaidachnyi Security Center Senior Fellow Olena Davlikanova discusses in a new episode of the KI Insights podcast.
The conversation moves from the anatomy of Russian “mental warfare” to the myth of Russian invincibility, takes in NATO’s blind spot and the drone incursions testing Europe’s nerve, and ends on the harder question of how a democracy defends its own mind.
Three things usually get blurred together, and Olena Davlikanova pulls them apart.
- Ordinary information and psychological operations try to steer what people think, or what they think about. Cognitive warfare, the framing most Western institutions reach for, works one level up, on how people think.
- What Russia calls mental warfare goes lower still, targeting who a person is — their identity and the values that shape them. Thus, Russia does much of its work at “phase zero”, long before any specific message arrives.
- By the time a claim or an event reaches a European audience, the lens used to interpret it has already been shaped. NATO’s cognitive playbook assumes the contest starts once information is in circulation, which is exactly why it keeps arriving a step behind.
One of the Kremlin’s most profitable exports is the belief that Russia simply cannot be beaten. It survives even among Europeans who sit inside NATO and its collective-defence guarantees. Olena Davlikanova treats it as the return on decades of patient Russian investment in how the continent sees the world.
The history says otherwise — the Livonian and Crimean wars, the war with Japan, the long bleed of Afghanistan — and so does Russia’s war against Ukraine, where Russia has poured years and staggering losses into capturing a handful of villages in the Donbas.
That myth carries a cost, and the conversation is candid about where Europe pays it. Years of American protection left the continent in the habit of waiting to be defended, slow to build the capacity to do it alone — a gap Moscow has been happy to test. The drone incursions into Polish and Romanian airspace look deliberate, a way of probing what Europe will tolerate and advertising what Russia can reach, and the hesitant responses so far have mostly proved the point.
The most uncomfortable exchange concerns Russian “high culture” — whether the reverence Europe still holds for it has served Moscow’s ends.
The possible answer is total defence, which in Olena Davlikanova’s account starts with cognition — a society that knows what it believes and is ready to hold that ground long before the question reaches weapons or fortified lines.
Listen to the full conversation on KI Insights: