While missiles rain down on Kyiv, Russia strikes the west where it’s weakest
Russia’s attack on the Ukrainian capital last week used the Oreshnik, an all-but-unstoppable ballistic missile. The physical effect was secondary. The real aim was to create fear, uncertainty and doubt.
The same is true of another Russian salvo, of gruesome, cynical pranks carried out in France and elsewhere last year, unveiled this weekend in a masterpiece of investigative reporting. These stunts, “cognitive strikes” according to their perpetrators, included dumping pigs’ heads, labelled “Macron”, outside French mosques in September 2025. In an operation in Germany, saboteurs put expanding foam in hundreds of cars’ exhaust pipes, leaving stickers reading “Be greener!” inciting hostility to the (strongly anti-Kremlin) Greens.
The missile attacks on Ukraine are not working. Ukrainians know that Russia is slowly losing, drawing on third-country soldiers to man the front line, and with supply lines to Crimea ever more vulnerable. The fear, exhaustion and suffering Ukrainian civilians endure at home from Russia’s “deranged” (to used President Zelensky’s description) attacks on civilian targets will leave lasting scars, physical, mental and social. But they do not change the determination to fight.
Western brains are softer, and the cognitive strikes against them are both cheaper and more likely to succeed. Two Estonian journalists, Martin Laine and Marta Vunš of Delfi, backed up by colleagues and published by a consortium of English, French, Russian, German and Hebrew news outlets, paint a picture of confident, well-financed and ingenious operations, based on a “cache of leaked documents” from the Social Design Agency. This innocuously named PR agency, already sanctioned by the EU, UK and US for conducting influence operations abroad, works closely with the Kremlin, notably with Sofia Zakharova, a senior official there. The documents describe past operations in France and Germany, and plans for other countries, notably Armenia, where parliamentary elections on June 7th could accelerate that country’s departure from Moscow’s zone of influence.
The leak includes gloating analysis of the wide media coverage resulting from “Operation Pig’s Head”, and an explanation of the rationale behind these stunts. Strengthening Russia’s global influence comes not from promoting overly pro-Russian messages, but by “deepening internal contradictions between [Western] ruling elites, stimulating protest activity among opposition forces, escalating anti-government protests, and ‘stirring up’ the amorphous portion of the electorate in NATO countries and their satellites,” reads a document (author unknown) apparently created in May 2023.
None of this should come as a surprise. During the cold war, KGB agents daubed swastikas on cemeteries in the west to promote the lie that neo-Nazism was rampant. Soviet spies fabricated a report, supposedly from Israel, saying that Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser, was a secret antisemite. Russia was playing similar tricks in the Baltic states in the early 1990s, even in the supposed heyday of democracy and reform. Previous stunts arranged by Russia in Paris included Stars of David graffiti, defacing the Holocaust memorial with red handprints and placing empty coffins labelled “French soldiers in Ukraine” near the Eiffel Tower.
But western voters should be asking hard questions. Why do we find out key details of this mischief-making thanks only to Estonian journalists? Should not our own well-financed spy agencies be doing this job? Or is that our politicians have muzzled them? And more importantly, what are our decision-makers going to do about these attacks? Locking up the perpetrators (mostly hapless proxies) is no defence or deterrent.
We could carry out some “cognitive strikes” of our own on Russia. But western leaders are scared of destabilising the Kremlin. Whoever comes after Vladimir Putin may be worse, they worry. Ukrainians, grimly clearing up yet more wreckage, are quite prepared to take that risk.
Edward Lucas is a British writer, journalist and security specialist
Photo credit: Ilya Pavlov on Unsplash