Abstract
Russia has been attempting to influence politics and society in various European and NATO countries in recent years, aiming at the minds of the citizens. Decades ago, Jacques Ellul (1973) described propaganda as a social phenomenon that grows within society and is intrinsically intertwined with it. In recent years, a new concept has been emerging and is even being described as the sixth operational domain – Cognitive Warfare (Cluzel 2021). The implications on the information domain were not yet explored in depth. Without a look back into the historical experience, it is impossible to assess what should be done in the long term by organizations such as the EU or NATO in the information environment. As Cognitive Warfare can be considered a relatively new phenomenon, albeit not dissimilar to Ellul's (1973) view of propaganda, the experience of nations involved in protracted conflicts of the 21st century, including Russia's hybrid warfare campaigns, is invaluable. Therefore, an inductive approach is utilized to draw inferences from available data from such countries. One of the nations used for the analysis is the Czech Republic, a country with a quite significant pro-Russian segment of society, which Russia has exploited for many years. The other is Ukraine, which is now in a full-out war but has been a victim of Russian hybrid warfare since at least the 2010s. The paper aims to assess the importance of continuous effort of organizations such as NATO or the EU in the cognitive, human-oriented domain. I expect the Czech and Ukraine's experiences to show that being on the defence in the cognitive domain might prove to be a mistake with a significant impact on the future of democracy for any country.