On 25 November 2025, the Independent Anti-Corruption Commission (NAKO) held a discussion titled “The Battlefield Is the Mind: How to Win Cognitive Wars?”. The speakers were:
- Maryna Bezkrovaina, Ukraine Country Director at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR);
- Andrii Ordynovych, retired colonel and Director of Strategic Development and Support at the Ukrainian Freedom Fund;
- Viktoriia Vyshnivska, Senior Researcher at NAKO;
- Stanislav Lurie, Head of Osavul’s Ukraine Office.
Maryna Bezkrovaina, IWPR’s Ukraine Country Director, set the frame for the discussion. She outlined the concept of cognitive warfare and explained how and why “cognitive weapons” work. For example, the fake narrative about “U.S. biolabs in Ukraine” spread rapidly among people who already had a certain level of distrust toward the United States, she noted. According to Bezkrovaina, protecting the information space requires the involvement of society as a whole — no single actor can manage it alone.
Cognitive operations in the military domain were the focus of the remarks by Andrii Ordynovych, Director of Strategic Development and Support at the Ukrainian Freedom Fund. He stated that Russia directs its information attacks against Ukraine along three main vectors: discrediting the military and political leadership, demobilizing volunteers and civil society, and demoralizing service members.
Russia and China have turned one of democracy’s greatest strengths — pluralism — into an information weapon. This point was emphasized by Viktoriia Vyshnivska, NAKO Senior Researcher. In cognitive warfare, authoritarian states focus on targeted stories designed to sow division among different groups in society. As a result, this undermines democracies from within, she noted.
Trends in the use of artificial intelligence in geopolitical competition were presented by Stanislav Lurie, Head of Osavul’s Ukraine Office. According to him, Russia is actively using the method of LLM grooming — mass flooding of the internet with low-quality, manipulative content. This turns generative chatbots (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok, and others) into sources of disinformation. According to NewsGuard, in 2025 chatbots reproduced 35% of manipulative content — up from 18% in 2024. Current chatbot updates do not solve this problem and only deepen it, Lurie cautioned.
