Understanding the conflict three years on.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin is escalating his offensive against Europe. After U.S. President Donald Trump’s failure to strike a “deal” with the Kremlin, Moscow has made repeated drone incursions into Poland and Denmark as well as broadening the range of its cyberattacks against other NATO members. Russia’s aggression has restarted the debate on what Europe and the United States can do to restrain it.

Ukraine’s allies have always pulled back from exerting maximum pressure on Russia. Now, that discussion is changing. Jack Watling of the Royal United Services Institute, for example, has argued for blocking Russia’s oil exports through the Baltic Sea while giving Ukraine the capability to hit Russia’s oil refineries. Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former Ukrainian defense minister, has advocated for disrupting military assets deep into Russian territory. In these combinations of kinetic and economic war, we need to add another dimension.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is escalating his offensive against Europe. After U.S. President Donald Trump’s failure to strike a “deal” with the Kremlin, Moscow has made repeated drone incursions into Poland and Denmark as well as broadening the range of its cyberattacks against other NATO members. Russia’s aggression has restarted the debate on what Europe and the United States can do to restrain it.

Ukraine’s allies have always pulled back from exerting maximum pressure on Russia. Now, that discussion is changing. Jack Watling of the Royal United Services Institute, for example, has argued for blocking Russia’s oil exports through the Baltic Sea while giving Ukraine the capability to hit Russia’s oil refineries. Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former Ukrainian defense minister, has advocated for disrupting military assets deep into Russian territory. In these combinations of kinetic and economic war, we need to add another dimension.

To make Putin worried enough to consider a cease-fire more seriously, we must act in the informational—or, as it is trendy to call it in security circles, the “cognitive”—domain. NATO is working on a new cognitive warfare concept, which the organization says will focus on how to “affect attitudes and behaviours by influencing, protecting, and/or disrupting individual and group cognitions to gain an advantage”—which includes being able to target informational campaigns to adversary audiences.

In our present context, information activities into Russia can have immediate tactical benefits, such as undermining conscription efforts—but these strategies are also an important part of any larger attempts to deter Russian aggression. Putin and his generation of rulers are obsessed with maintaining the perception that they can control the domestic situation inside Russia.

One of the reasons that the Kremlin

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