Goerge Barros, the Russia team lead at the Institute for the Study of War, writing at Foreign Policy explains Putin’s “cognitive warfare.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin has worked hard to convince the world that Ukraine’s defeat is inevitable when it is not. His biggest success has come not on the front line but in the battle of narratives. Since meeting with Putin in Alaska, Donald Trump has shifted from demanding an immediate ceasefire to pressuring Kyiv to hand over unoccupied territory to Moscow based on the false idea that Russia is bound to win. “They’re much bigger. They’re much stronger,” Trump has said, giving Russia the “upper hand” in Ukraine.
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Putin’s narrative of inevitable Russian victory rests on false claims: Ukraine’s front line is on the verge of collapse; Russia will capture the territories it claims; Russia has the manpower and resources to sustain the war indefinitely; and Ukraine cannot defeat the Russian military. Invoking the Soviet Red Army’s crushing of the German Wehrmacht in World War II, the Kremlin wants us to think that today’s much smaller Russian military is an unstoppable steamroller destined to win.
This is more than propaganda. It is a system of cognitive warfare designed to shape Western leaders’ assumptions and push them toward decisions that benefit Russia and disadvantage Ukraine.
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Putin and his lieutenants are masking the reality that Russian forces are advancing literally at a snail’s pace, achieving small gains at huge and unsustainable costs. In 2025, Russia captured just 0.8 percent of Ukraine’s territory, far below typical rates in modern mechanized warfare. Even some of the most infamous trench battles in World War I showed more rapid overall advances.
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The war’s decisive battleground thus remains international support for Ukraine. Putin rightly assesses that if he can outlast the West—or better yet, persuade it to abandon Ukraine—Russia will win. The false narrative of inevitable Russian victory should not influence Western policy.
Slava Ukraine!
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