The year 2025 became a watershed moment in many ways, both for me personally and for the world as a whole. It fundamentally altered our perception of reality and plunged humanity even deeper into total uncertainty, characteristic of the painful, destabilising turmoil of yet another phase transition, which thinkers around the world have been discussing.
The United States, new technologies and reality
A phase transition, or a transition to a new technological order, is a leap-like transformation of technologies that changes everything. It does not simply make processes “faster, higher, stronger”. It alters their direction and their cause-and-effect relationships. The development of artificial intelligence, the scaling of computing power, changes in financial instruments, and the destruction and creation of production and trade chains — all of this reshapes our perception of reality.
This is because technological change necessitates changes in human relations and in the principles of human resource management. Consequently, the phase transition already demands fundamental changes in how we plan the development of our society. It can be argued that we were most affected by the changes that took place in the United States in 2025. The paradigm shift brought about by the new White House administration directly affected many people in Ukraine, as a significant number were left without salaries and jobs due to the effective withdrawal of USAID from Ukraine. The curtailment of many projects in areas traditionally associated with the information space triggered new discussions and a search for alternative approaches.
Looking inward
In expert circles, there was a sharp increase in discussion around elements of cognitive security and cognitive warfare. In the political sphere, the winding down of debates about “Ukrainian unity”, the creation of the Ministry of Unity, the unnatural expansion of its vague powers in the field of strategic communications, and its subsequent inglorious liquidation ultimately created space for work on implementing the Law of Ukraine “On the Basic Principles of State Policy in the Sphere of Affirming Ukrainian National and Civic Identity”, adopted on 13 December 2022.
Exactly three years after the adoption of this law, the Office of the President of Ukraine and individuals close to it began systematically promoting the institutionalisation of work in the field of identity. This process relied on the existing administrative infrastructure of the Ministry of Youth and Sports of Ukraine, as well as the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine, as tools for investing state funds in the creation of content intended to affirm Ukrainian identity both domestically and internationally.
Of course, it would have been more expedient for all processes related to identity to take place within a single administrative institution, as planned in 2019 with the creation of the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sports of Ukraine. However, the function of “counteracting” and “fighting”, rather than “creating” and “spreading”, instilled by donor funding, levelled this otherwise sound initiative.
Under the influence of public opinion and the wishes of the President, Volodymyr Borodyanskyy then began drafting a law on disinformation, which predictably proved unsuccessful. Later, in the name of political balance, sport and youth policy were returned to the old Soviet administrative framework.
Nevertheless, this paradigm shift is of epochal significance for us, despite all the “yellow media” publications about the “1,000 hours of content festival-pitching” and the birth of Deputy Prime Minister Tetyana Berezhna’s child, for which we sincerely congratulate her and wish her good health.
The discussion about our identity, and the stories we want to tell each other and the rest of the world, represents a long-awaited return of focus to ourselves and inward. It is primarily about our own capabilities and our own vision of reality. This stands in contrast to the decade-long dominance of an external focus — a concentration on hostile fakes and narratives which, due to the need to report to donors, we were forced to constantly study, rehash and disseminate to Ukrainian audiences.
Regardless of how the budgetary funds for 1,000 hours of content are spent, this content will most likely not focus on Russian fakes and narratives, which we are already weary of discussing, but on who we are and who we aspire to become.
A change in thinking and our shadow
A paradigm shift has also taken place on a key battlefield with Russia — in the sphere of reflection. For the past five years, I have been intensively studying and teaching individual elements of reflective control, a methodology for thinking independently and influencing the thinking of others. This methodology has been developed since the 1950s by Heorgiy Shchedrovitskyy and his circle, who introduced the concept of “system–thought–activity methodology” — essentially a science of thinking, cognitive processes and their management.
Today, the key representatives of this intellectual environment are senior politicians of our adversary, the Russian Federation: Anton Vaino, Head of the Presidential Administration of the Russian Federation, and Sergei Kirienko, First Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration. In addition to them, this discussion includes Kirienko’s subordinate Aleksandr Kharichev, Kremlin court propagandist of nuclear apocalypse Sergei Karaganov, Sergei Pereslegin, Alexander Dugin and others.
In 2025 alone, at least four strategic documents were published outlining who the Russians are and what Russian civilisation represents. One of Sergei Kirienko’s flagship political projects, “social architects”, which is based entirely on Shchedrovitskyy’s practices of social management, has entered an active phase of implementation.
All these practices did not work on Ukrainians for one simple reason: we are not one people, never have been, and never will be. However, our key problem was and remains singular. We know that “Ukraine is not Russia”, as Leonid Danylovych Kuchma told us long ago. We know that we are not them. Yet it remains difficult for us to articulate who we are and what Ukraine is, beyond the assertion that it is not Russia.
I consider the documentary project by journalist Myroslava Barchuk and producer Volodymyr Ladyzhets, The Last War, and the film produced within this project, The Ukrainian Curse: Builders and Destroyers of the Empire, to be central to this paradigm shift in our internal reflection.
The film raises one of the key issues for me — the responsibility of Ukrainians for the European space stretching from the left bank of the Dnipro to the Ural Mountains. It confronts the realisation that we helped to create an empire that is now killing us. It poses the question of the “shadow of civilisation” — of our own shadow.
This latest trend in self-reflection has been taken up by Maria Berlinska, a well-known volunteer and founder of the Dignitas charity fund. In her programmatic article and in an interview with Nataliya Moseychuk, she emphasises that the cognitive battlefield is becoming decisive. The war is moving to a new level of complexity for which we are still unprepared. Maria’s key message is that we “must work with Russia from a position of adulthood”, because we are the only adults left on this continent.
Cognitive superiority and Russia
The topic of cognitive warfare and cognitive security is currently being discussed intensively within NATO. Since the summer of this year, the Alliance has been actively circulating briefings, publishing academic articles and holding panel discussions on the subject. According to rumours, new strategic documents are now in preparation.
In my view, after the eloquent failure of the evolution of terminology over the past ten years, the term “cognitive warfare” has been poorly chosen. At the beginning of 2014, we spoke of Russian propaganda, then disinformation, misinformation, cyber threats, critical thinking, digital hygiene, media literacy, PSYOP. Eventually, Western countries began to institutionalise the term FIMI (foreign information manipulation and interference). Instead of a single-word definition, the phenomenon was described using four words and a rather curious abbreviation, reminiscent of a kitten’s nickname.
When we speak of cognitive confrontation, we most often mean interference in cognitive processes or manipulation through the distortion of reality. In this field, NATO has an established and specific term: cognitive superiority. Broadly speaking, cognitive superiority is a state of victory in cognitive warfare — something to be achieved.
In the classical sense, cognitive superiority refers to a perception of the battlefield and of reality that is not distorted by the “fog of war” or by deception operations (misleading the enemy — Ed.) conducted by the adversary.
In other words, there exists a certain “reference reality”, the most accurate and undistorted perception and understanding of which by a military commander leads to correct decisions capable of guaranteeing victory on the battlefield.
This was demonstrated even more simply to NATO forces during joint exercises with Ukrainian units in the Baltic states. Any military unit operating a Mavic drone during the exercises neutralised all simulated opponents because it could see them, while they could not see it. Ironically, NATO officers later asked the Ukrainians not to use drones during the exercises because “the other guys are offended that they keep losing”.
However, this understanding of cognitive superiority is valid only for physical space — the battlefield. This is because physical reality, with its terrain, subjects and objects, is more or less constant: the better you know the battlefield, the better you fight.
When we move to political debates about whether Russia constitutes a separate civilisation, whether what is written in the Epstein files is true, or whether China has a right to Taiwan, there is no such thing as a “reference point” or axiomatic reality. And if there is no benchmark for facts and axiomatic statements, cognitive superiority becomes a multidimensional space in which it belongs to those who are capable of changing the thinking of others.
In this sense, cognitive superiority transforms from a defensive tactic (“I am stronger because I understand reality better than my opponent”) into an offensive one (“I am stronger because I can create my own reality for my opponent”). However, our Western partners fear this transformation intensely, as they believe it “could lead to escalation”.
This is why the current understanding of cognitive warfare contains so many flaws, and why I do not find it particularly convincing. But who will ask me? The budgets for 2026 that include the word “cognitive” have already been approved. Or, as my ensign used to say, “aluminium means aluminium”.
Maturing consciousness
And yet, this year we have taken a truly momentous step forward. The war of 2026 will move even deeper into our consciousness and into the consciousness of our adversaries — a space in which it has, in fact, been unfolding since 1708.
Our task is to support the emerging trends of “maturity”: the affirmation of identity and the development of cognitive technologies which, under certain conditions, can become effective tools in countering Shchedrovitskyy’s reflexive management.
In my view, the discussion surrounding the process of affirming identity, as well as the development and dissemination of content, should be a priority for us for one simple reason. If we take another careful look at the semantics of the terms used by our Western partners, we will see that they continue to carry exclusively defensive meanings:
- Drone wall;
- Countering disinformation;
- Critical thinking;
- Digital hygiene.
All these categories and images leave no room even for the idea that we might need to act upon the enemy or influence them in any way. They are aimed solely at defence, not at offence.
By contrast, the process of establishing identity has neither physical nor virtual boundaries. The affirmation of Ukrainian identity can take place across the entire planet — in those parts of it that matter to us. It is a process of unlimited dissemination of how Ukrainians perceive reality. And if we understand how we perceive reality, and work persistently to share this understanding with others — who knows.
Perhaps, in the end, everything really will be Ukraine.