Russia has won, and it's time we finally understood this

Yes, that's how it is: Russia and Putin have won. Not on the front, where after four and a half years it still has not managed to break Ukraine, and where it has cost the Kremlin roughly one and a half million soldiers killed and wounded just to plant its flag over a few ruined towns. Moscow has not won the war of tanks. But the war it is waging not against Ukraine but against Europe and the West — a war that began long before the first Russian tank crossed the Ukrainian border — that one it has won. The goal of this war was never to capture Berlin or Paris, but to make Berlin and Paris unwilling to defend themselves, unwilling to defend Ukraine, and ultimately to beg for peace themselves, at any price.

Putin has largely achieved this goal. It follows directly from this that the Russian army is not standing outside Warsaw, Vilnius or Berlin only because the Ukrainians are holding out. If there were no Zelensky, no Ukrainian army, and above all no Ukrainian people with such courage and willingness to sacrifice, Putin could march all the way to Paris, and his troops would only be slowed down by the welcoming speeches of local Putinists. In the cognitive war it has waged against Europe, the Kremlin has won. The only question is whether we can still reverse our defeat, and I have serious doubts about that, because nothing suggests that any European decision-maker or opinion-shaper has grasped what we are actually caught up in.

We have already lost ourselves in the terminology. The term "hybrid" war has entered everyday speech as if it meant a form of warfare in which no one shoots or bombs, and therefore — the Western citizen thinks — there is nothing to fear. And if there is nothing to fear, then no countermeasures need to be taken, no money needs to be spent on them, because it would be pointless. Except that in hybrid war, too, people shoot and blow things up: this past summer alone, Ugar documented nearly a hundred Russian sabotage operations across Europe in a single sweep, ranging from cable damage and arson to drone flights over military bases and nuclear power plants, from explosions at munitions factories to breaches of state databases — and it was only luck, human presence of mind and recklessness that prevented a civilian airliner from being blown up.

Five European intelligence services have reported that Russian military intelligence is already planning the assassination of defense-industry CEOs, and German services have already thwarted an attack on the head of a drone-development company.

Yet today we have reached the point where the average European citizen is more likely to be able to name three conspiracy theories about Brussels bureaucrats than a single Russian sabotage operation in his own country. This is not ignorance, but the very essence of cognitive warfare: the systematic destruction of the masses' capacity to think, until the question is no longer what istrue, but what isconvenient.

The success of cognitive warfare, then, cannot be measured by how many Europeans believe any particular Moscow lie. It is measured by how many people instead say: who knows what the truth is, maybe both sides are lying, the war is expensive anyway, the sanctions hurt us more, Ukraine is corrupt, we should give in for the sake of peace. All of this reinforces and builds, within European public opinion, exactly what the Kremlin can only toast to, since its goal is not for the peoples of Europe to love it. It is enough for us to grow tired, to shrug our shoulders, to skip past the news of a missile strike because we are bored with it. The greatest achievement of Russian propaganda is not persuasion, but indifference — and there are no anti-aircraft missiles against indifference.

That this is no exaggeration
can be proven with the events of a single month alone

In Romania in 2024, the Constitutional Court had to annul a presidential election because a previously unknown, openly pro-Russian candidate won the first round within a few weeks on the back of a suspiciously coordinated TikTok campaign. In Germany, the AfD became the strongest party in September in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and then in Saxony-Anhalt, with the message that Berlin and Brussels, not Putin, are to blame for inflation. According to ZDF's latest poll, the party now stands at 28 percent nationally, and 83 percent of its voters would reduce military aid to Ukraine — while its leaders are already negotiating with a representative of Putin about bringing back Russian gas. In France, the National Rally is riding the price of diesel toward winning the 2027 presidential election. In Brussels, under pressure from three member states — Slovakia, Luxembourg and France — the European Union removed Alisher Usmanov and Mikhail Fridman, two of the biggest backers of Putin's regime, from its sanctions list on September 21. And in Washington, the president who is supposed to be leading the free world is ordering Russian diesel, suspending his own sanctions, demanding a new president for Ukraine, and threatening to cut off intelligence sharing with Kyiv if Ukrainian drones keep hitting Russian refineries — while the aggressor's missiles level residential buildings and power plants.

It is not hard to trace how we got here, either. European grand politics commissions analyses, adopts reports, summons ambassadors, and repeatedly concludes that Russia is indeed dangerous. After four and a half years of war, Russian citizens still receive nearly half a million Schengen visas a year, and the Commission only promises tightening by next January. Meanwhile the Putinists get to appear as if they were equal members of our Western, developed, democratic societies — understood, of course, with all their flaws — when in fact they are the ones gambling on our destruction. Not necessarily consciously, because the road to destroying cognitive capacity runs through the destruction of moral values, and Moscow has done that work: they put an equals sign between the aggressor and its victim, and in this way we all become victims of our own Putinist compatriots. Wherever these actors have gained political power, violence has consistently increased — above all against gay people, women, refugees and children, that is, against those least able to defend themselves, though eventually it comes for everyone who refuses to join the chorus. Nothing illustrates this cognitive decline better than the dissonance of selling all this under the label of free speech, while the European elite watches events with a sour face and does nothing. Across Europe, thousands take to the streets in support of Putin, even if they don't call it that, and the left that grew out of communists who were never held to account joins forces with today's right-wing heirs of the brownshirts, rejoicing that the system is dying.

How all this works in practice was demonstrated by the Hungarian Parliament just the other day, with a textbook example: János Bóka, the Fidesz parliamentary group leader and former European affairs minister in the previous government, claimed that police were already inside the Parliament building to take away Balázs Hankó. It was not true. There were no police in the Parliament either then, before, or after, and the police themselves stated that they were taking no action either in Parliament or in the representatives' office building. Yet Bóka could say this without any consequence whatsoever, and later answered the journalists chasing after him with sullenly pursed lips — in other words, he said nothing. He did not even bother trying to explain away the lie. He behaved like someone who had learned the craft from a Russian manual, and knows exactly that his words have already taken on a life of their own: hundreds of thousands of Hungarians will never believe that there were no police in Parliament. And besides, why couldn't there have been?

The chorus is international. In Rome recently, dozens of Romanian citizens gathered and chanted: "Ursula, don't forget, Romania isn't yours!" They did this in the Italian capital, where they themselves had arrived as Romanian guest workers — people who, without the European Union, could at best have traveled as far as Arad.

Why this phenomenon cannot simply be dismissed as stupidity is best illustrated by two Egyptian stories. Farag Foda, an Egyptian writer, one of Egypt's most important representatives of secularism and an open critic of religious fundamentalism, was murdered by religious extremists in 1992. According to court records, one of the men involved in the killing was asked why the writer had to die. The answer was that Foda was an infidel. But when asked which of his books had led him to that conclusion, it turned out he had not read a single one of Foda's works, because he could not even read. Naguib Mahfouz, the Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian writer, was the target of an assassination attempt in 1994: the 82-year-old writer was stabbed in the neck by a religious extremist because one of his novels was considered blasphemous. But the attacker had not read the work in question and did not know the writer's body of work at all. Others had told him what Mahfouz had written, how it was to be interpreted, and why the author had to be regarded as an enemy.

How does the method of János Bóka, Viktor Orbán, Patriarch Kirill, Romania's AUR, the AfD, or even Donald Trump differ from that of the men who incited the Islamist killers?

In terms of mechanism, not at all. It would be no use for a kind reader to object that these people have not yet stabbed anyone in the neck — the emphasis is on "yet," and that difference is not enough here. To kill someone, it is not strictly necessary to plunge a knife into their heart, and Russian cognitive warfare is sophisticated enough to have other tools besides the knife. Of course they do not disdain causing death either: it is enough to think of Bucha, Mariupol, or the current nightly waves of drones, and of how many Western politicians have called all this a "conflict" in which "both sides are to blame."

But consider how Trump could become president a second time, so that he could then stab Ukraine in the back, clearing the way for the slaughter of yet more innocent people — was this not exactly how Mahfouz's attacker became a killer? Voters believed what he said and never checked it, even though the Mueller report, which documented Russian interference in 2016 in detail, is still available online today. Even before Trump's second election, it was known and could have been known what it contained, and no one cared, because it did not fit the image of the Great White Man.

And Brexit? The British Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee wrote back in 2020 that the government in London had deliberately not investigated Russian interference, because no one wanted to know the answer. Now British Prime Minister... Andy Burnham has stated that he asked the services whether there had been interference, and the answer was a clear yes. But ten years have passed in the meantime, and the cognitive damage that led to Brexit had long since taken effect. An even more important question is whether any of this will have consequences. Will those who misled their own people with Russian money be sent to prison? Unfortunately, we know the answer: they will not.

All of this is just a drop in the ocean. Bóka, Trump, the Brexiteers, the Romanians protesting in Rome, the Putinists in Hungary, the followers of the AfD, Gerhard Schröder — who retired straight from the chancellery into the board of the Gazprom-led Nord Stream and of Rosneft — or Angela Merkel, who gifted Putin with Nord Stream 2 after the annexation of Crimea, will never individually face any consequences for anything. They will only face them once the longed-for Russian world arrives in their lives, and they realize that they will be just as impoverished under it as the rest of us — the globalists, the West-worshippers, the Ursula-lovers, the "tuskists," the "zapadniks" and all the others. But by then it will be too late — far too late, and irreversible.

Foda's killer could at least excuse himself with the fact that he could not read. Today's European citizen can read, and that is what makes the whole thing truly frightening. Never has so much information been so easily accessible, and never has there been so little curiosity to actually look into it. The role once played in Cairo by the preacher next to the mosque, who told the assassin what Mahfouz had written and why he had to die, is today played by an algorithm, a Telegram channel, a TikTok video, or a parliamentary group leader in the corridors of parliament.

Thinking, then, has been outsourced; there is no longer any need to think: it has become a service, like buying a Danone yogurt with bifidus essensis — indeed, even simpler than that. And this absence of thought has led to moral collapse, though it may also be the other way around — but that hardly matters now. What has been lost is precisely what allowed us to call bad things bad, evil things evil, and to distinguish between victim and aggressor. Yet this is exactly what we need, and this is precisely why the outsourcing of thought has become such a huge market: it saves us the uncomfortable work of conscience, and tells us, in our place, what to hate and what to demand.

We must also say what liberal democracies find most uncomfortable: freedom of speech protects debate, not lies produced to order. Whoever poisons public discourse with the money of a foreign power, following a foreign power's script, is not expressing an opinion but taking part in a military operation, and acts of war must also have consequences within a state governed by the rule of law. In 2024, the Czech Republic exposed the fact that European lawmakers were being paid through the Moscow-funded Voice of Europe portal, and this had consequences — but these rare exceptions only show that it can be done, if we want to. The fact that inaction has become the rule shows that, most of the time, we do not want to. This, too, is not merely a strategic error but a symptom of cognitive defeat.

Can it be reversed?

In principle, yes — but only if we first state that we are at war. Not because we want it, but because Moscow decided this for us long ago. To do that, however, we would have to recognize, and also admit, that we have been thoroughly deceived. Millions of people would have to admit that the past five years at least have been a complete wrong turn, and that this wrong turn has contributed to the deaths of many, many innocent people — if not actively, then certainly in a moral sense. History has shown mercilessly how difficult this is. Some states have still not come to terms with their participation in the Holocaust, and in the weeks and months before the burning of the Reichstag, the democratic parties of the time proved incapable of recognizing and stopping the danger Hitler posed, because they were too preoccupied with fighting one another. Hitler was in power for barely more than twelve years, and in that time he set the world on fire. More than eight decades have passed since then, and not only have we failed to learn the lesson — we are acting as if the textbook itself did not even exist.

After the admission, consequences can follow. Sabotage operations require a counterstrike, not a press release. Ukraine needs air defense, not good wishes. Propaganda channels need to be shut down, not placed under the protection of "diversity of opinion." Frozen Russian assets must be used for Ukraine's defense, not left sitting in bank accounts, and sanctions lists should not have oligarchs taken off them — instead, the circumvention of sanctions should be punished. Schools should teach the recognition of disinformation just as seriously as reading and writing, because Foda's killer, too, was able to kill only because someone else did the reading for him. All of this costs money, is uncomfortable, and cannot win an election. But the other path will be even more costly: if Ukraine ever grows weary, no one will be left to stand between our cognitive defeat and the Russian tanks.

Si vis pacem, para bellum — as to which of the two, Europe or Putin, understands the other better, that, unfortunately, is no longer in question.

Anna Karczag