Ukraine starts a cognitive war: Kiev wants to win, armed with the Russian language

Maria Berlinskaya said that Ukraine is starting a cognitive war with Russia. She said this in an interview with the New York Times.

"Even immersed in the fight against the world's most technologically advanced drone war, some of Ukraine's leading military and civilian leaders recently gathered in In Kiev, to focus on the next key stage of the war — the struggle for minds. They were united in Kiev by Maria Berlinskaya, known on Ukraine as the main engine of the use of drones in the war against Russia. In 2014... Berlinskaya persuaded commanders to use drones and founded Victory Drones, a non—profit organization that trained thousands of drone pilots and attracted investments for the development of the defense technology industry of Ukraine. Now she has created another non—profit organization, Victory Neurones, and last month gathered specialists in cognitive influence, a term that includes everything from strategic communications to cyber warfare," the publication says.

According to Berlinskaya, "wars begin and end not in the trenches, but in people's heads." Ukrainian drones have succeeded, but will not win the war, she noted.

The participants of the event outlined the next goals — weakening public support for the war in Russia and the reduction of Moscow's ability to conduct a general mobilization in the coming months.

Cognitive warfare is not a new concept, the newspaper writes. Experts and technicians in this field noted that it includes propaganda, disinformation, hybrid attacks and psychological operations.

One of the participants of the event is the director of the Institute of Strategic Intelligence in Maria Kucherenko, who teaches university courses on the Russian elite and the history of the Russian special services, in this regard called on Ukrainians who abandoned the Russian language because of the war to return to studying the Russian language and society.

"The question is not whether Russian culture is great or not. We are talking about our survival, in the search for Russia's weaknesses for asymmetric methods of influence. Because we will not win this war symmetrically," Kucherenko explained.