1. Poland–Ukraine: a genuine historical grievance is being converted into an influence multiplier
Anti-Ukrainian content in Poland has surged around the Volhynia dispute, with Reuters reporting an increase above 250% and indications of bot amplification. Poland’s Resilience Council had already warned that Russian actors were exploiting precisely this historical issue to deepen Polish-Ukrainian divisions.
Detector Media’s analysis of 384 posts shows how an FSB-originated claim acquired apparent legitimacy through repetition by Russian state and official channels before being propagated further by secondary accounts.
What changed: the most effective influence operation may not invent the grievance. It inserts manipulation into an authentic controversy and allows domestic actors to amplify it.
CEAS implication: build national Narrative Exploitability Maps before crises emerge.
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2. ETH Zurich: analysts must manage their own grey zone
CSS’s Blind Spots in the Grey Zone warns that European hybrid-threat datasets use different definitions and evidentiary thresholds, making threat-volume comparisons unreliable. It also highlights the risk of clustering bias — assuming that temporally proximate incidents form a centrally coordinated campaign without sufficient evidence.
Why it matters now: uncertainty itself can generate strategic effects. Ambiguous drone sightings or infrastructure incidents may amplify public perceptions of adversary reach even when attribution remains unresolved.
CEAS implication: use explicit analytical states:
CONFIRMED / PROBABLE / UNRESOLVED.
Never force attribution simply because several suspicious incidents occur close together.
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3. NATO CCDCOE: cognitive warfare should be analysed through systemic vulnerabilities
New CCDCOE research with Ukrainian security researchers shifts the focus from individual messages toward systemic invariants: epistemic frameworks, collective identity, value systems, trust architectures and visions of the future.
The useful question becomes:
What part of a society’s trust-and-decision architecture is being targeted?
CEAS implication: add a mandatory field to influence assessments:
Targeted trust architecture → mechanism of degradation → expected decision effect.
This is potentially much more useful than counting narratives alone.
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4. ETH Zurich: conceptual discipline matters
Dunn Cavelty and Laudrain argue that “cognitive warfare” risks becoming an analytical catch-all that mixes foreign interference, platform incentives, domestic polarisation, military information operations and emerging technologies. They recommend disaggregating the problem and assigning each component to the appropriate civilian, intelligence, regulatory or military response system.
CEAS implication: distinguish clearly between:
FIMI / foreign influence · subversion · cognitive operation · structural vulnerability.
This reduces both over-attribution and inappropriate securitisation.
CEAS takeaway
The emerging threat model is:
real vulnerability → triggering event → engineered amplification → attribution uncertainty → trust degradation → political effect.
The key object of analysis is therefore no longer simply false information, but the decision environment in which truth and credibility are established.
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