Find the new article by Christine Dugoin-Clément, Affiliate Professor at the Sorbonne Business School !
Beyond military confrontation, the war in Ukraine is unfolding in the digital domain and in informational space. A veritable cognitive war is underway. On May 10, 2025, following the establishment of the "coalition of the willing", Emmanuel Macron, Keir Starmer and Friedrich Merz travelled to Kiev by night train from Poland. The images from this overnight trip were used by Russia to launch a new disinformation campaign targeting France: President Macron was portrayed as a cocaine addict, as he was seen putting away a handkerchief - a handkerchief which the initiators of this fake news, notably taken up by Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for the French Foreign Ministry, presented as being in reality a bag of cocaine. This attack, far from being the first of its kind, forced the Élysée to publish a scathing denial on its X account.
At the same time, Russia is not neglecting the domestic theater: the first deputy head of the presidential administration, Sergei Kirienko, has set up the so-called "Social Architects" project, which provides him with a network of political technologists throughout the Russian Federation.
At the international level, Russian interference is a tool of conflictuality which, because it targets human decision-making and perceptions, is mobilized through cognitive warfare, which here serves Russian war aims. The importance of cognitive warfare is such that Westerners who are working to define doctrines on the subject.
While there is much analysis of movements on the front line, less emphasis is placed on the fact that, through its resistance to Moscow, Ukraine is showing the rest of the world that it is possible to vigorously oppose the Kremlin's aims, thereby undermining the image of invincibility that the Kremlin seeks to project. This resistance could be summed up in one Ukrainian word: "воля" (volia), which has the dual meaning of "will" and "freedom".