On an evening at the end of December 2025, a woman in Switzerland opened a grocery-delivery app on her phone. She filled a basket and typed in a delivery address in Brussels—a flat she had visited many times, whose owner could no longer leave Belgium and could no longer pay for anything from within it. She entered her Swiss card at checkout. The payment declined. She tried again. It declined again.
The man waiting for the groceries is Jacques Baud, seventy years old, a retired colonel of the Swiss Army and a former officer of the Federal Intelligence Service who had worked in Brussels for NATO. On December 15, 2025, fifteen days before the blocked delivery, the Council of the European Union had placed him on a list. He was now, in the language of the Official Journal, a person “responsible for, implementing or supporting actions or policies attributable to the Government of the Russian Federation.” His accounts were frozen across the twenty-seven member states. His travel across Schengen was forbidden. Any EU resident who sent him money—for rent, for medicine, for a sandwich—committed a criminal offence. The European payment network, scanning the delivery address against the list, declined the payment automatically. Friends in Brussels began carrying food to his door.
Baud had not been charged with a crime. He had never seen a judge. What he had done was write and speak—in books published in Paris, in podcasts recorded with American journalists—about the war in Ukraine in terms that diverged from the Council’s preferred account. He had argued, among other things, that the Ukrainian government’s pursuit of NATO membership had helped precipitate the 2022 invasion, an argument he had drawn, with attribution, from a 2019 interview given by Oleksiy Arestovych, then one of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s senior advisers. For this he had become, in the sense the word once meant in medieval Europe, an outlaw: a person placed outside the law’s protection, left to the kindness of neighbors who could still physically carry groceries to his door.
The law that produced this condition is the enforcement arm of a military program most Europeans and Americans have never heard of. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation has been running the programme since 2020, out of a unit in Norfolk, Virginia called the Innovation Hub. The program’s name is Cognitive Warfare. Its founding paper, authored by retired French Lieutenant-Colonel François du Cluzel and published in January 2021, describes its target terrain in a phrase borrowed from the vocabulary of counter-subversion:
“…an embedded fifth column, where everyone, unbeknownst to him or her, is behaving according to the plans of one of our competitors.”
The paper defined the human mind as the sixth domain of military operations, after land, sea, air, cyber, and space. “Developing capabilities to harm the cognitive abilities of opponents will be a necessity,” it stated. “Its field of action is global and aim[s] to seize control of the human being, civilian as well as military.”
In October 2021, du Cluzel was asked directly, in a panel hosted by the NATO Association of Canada, whether the cognitive domain extended to NATO’s own populations. His answer, recorded in the Innovation Hub’s own proceedings, began with the word “population.” The cognitive domain went “way beyond our service members,” he said, and NATO would “need to protect our population.” A peer-reviewed analysis of NATO’s 2023 framing documents quotes the alliance identifying “a surge in anti-establishment populism” as a possible indicator of successful adversary cognitive operations. Domestic political dissent, in this framing, appears in the evidence column for foreign manipulation.
In December 2025, NATO Chief Scientist Dr Bryan Wells published the most authoritative public doctrinal statement the program has produced. Cognitive warfare, he wrote, operates “below the threshold of armed conflict,” targeting “education, media, technology platforms, and public trust in institutions.” The document describes cognitive attacks as designed to “activate the subconscious processes in our brains, making it difficult for our conscious minds to perceive the presence of a cognitive threat.”
The doctrine has moved into operational practice. The techniques are deployed, the funders are named, and at least one NATO member-state military has been confirmed in its own parliament running operations on its own civilian population.
In May 2024, ahead of the European parliamentary elections, Google Jigsaw ran a campaign of short animated ads on YouTube and TikTok across Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, and Poland. The technique is called pre-bunking. It was developed at the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab by Professor Sander van der Linden and his colleague Jon Roozenbeek, in a research program funded by Google, DARPA, the Gates Foundation, the United Kingdom Cabinet Office, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and WhatsApp. The technique was published by NATO’s Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence in Riga. Its inventor describes it openly as a “psychological vaccine”—repeated exposure conditions the viewer to feel reflexive suspicion of certain rhetorical patterns (“elite,” “corporate media,” “establishment”) before any conscious evaluation of the underlying argument. The technique targets the style of dissent, so that true claims delivered in the flagged style trigger the rejection reflex identically to false ones.
The U.K. Cabinet Office’s Behavioural Insights Team—nicknamed the Nudge Unit—operates from a framework called MINDSPACE: nine levers including affect, priming, defaults, social norms. During COVID, peer-reviewed research now confirms, these tools were deployed in what the researchers themselves called “fear nudges,” worst-case-scenario framings and moralising messages calibrated to override deliberation. The same unit, the same framework, remains available to British government for the next crisis.
In March 2020, the British Army activated its 77th Brigade—an information-operations unit originally constituted in 2015 to target the Taliban and al-Qaed— on British soil, under Operation RESCRIPT. The brigade compiled dossiers on British citizens posting about COVID, including the then-Leader of the Opposition Keir Starmer, sitting Conservative MPs David Davis and Chris Green, and the journalist Peter Hitchens. The brigade’s own whistleblower told Parliament:
“It was about domestic perception, not national security. The monitored posts did not contain information that was untrue or coordinated. It was simply fear and domestic dissent.”
Defence Secretary Ben Wallace admitted the operation on the floor of the House of Commons in January 2023. Nobody was prosecuted. The brigade still operates.
The Canadian precedent is similar. In April 2020, the Canadian Joint Operations Command launched an information operation aimed at “shaping” and “exploiting” the flow of information to the Canadian public to “head off civil disobedience” during pandemic lockdowns. The Chief of Staff at CJOC, Rear Admiral Brian Santarpia, wrote that the pandemic represented “a learning opportunity for all of us and a chance to start getting information operations into our (CAF-DND) routine.” The federal cabinet had not authorised the operation. Some elements continued for six months after the Chief of Defence Staff ordered them suspended. A separate intelligence-gathering project was harvesting social-media data on Black Lives Matter organisers in Ontario. No one was disciplined.
A NATO-member military ran cognitive operations against its own civilian population, against sitting members of its own parliament, against journalists—and the consequence for the institution that did it was zero. That is what has now been normalized.
When cognitive techniques fail to produce compliance—when somebody keeps speaking, keeps publishing, keeps gathering an audience—a second instrument activates. On October 8, 2024, the Council of the European Union adopted Decision (CFSP) 2024/2643, a sanctions framework against Russia’s so-called hybrid threats. The framework’s language is extraordinary. It authorizes the Council to designate, for asset freeze and travel ban, any person “responsible for, implementing or supporting” actions attributable to the Russian government that “undermine or threaten democracy, the rule of law, stability or security” anywhere in the Union or in a third country. One ground for designation is participation in “coordinated information manipulation and interference,” a phrase the decision does not define operationally. No criminal conviction is required. No indictment. No judicial finding. A proposal is drafted by the European External Action Service, adopted by the Council in closed session, and published the following morning in the Official Journal. The freeze takes effect on publication. Enforcement is automated through the European payment network and is mandatory for every bank operating in the Eurozone.
In May 2025, the Council added twenty-one individuals to the list. One was a journalist named Hüseyin Doğru. Doğru, born in Berlin to Turkish parents, was the founder of an online news platform called red.media and of its parent company, AFA Medya, registered in Istanbul. Red had launched in early 2024 and had built an audience through its reporting on Germany’s Palestine solidarity movement. Its cameras had been inside the pro-Palestine encampment at Humboldt University; its footage had documented German police clearing protest spaces. The EEAS Strategic Communications Division’s FIMI threat report, published in March 2025, named red. Two months later, the Council placed Doğru on the sanctions roster.
Red.media closed the day the sanctions were published. Doğru’s bank account was frozen within hours. So was his pregnant wife’s, though she had not been named on any list. He was given fifteen days to surrender his German identity card. He was placed on a €506 monthly subsistence allowance, less than half the rent on a one-bedroom flat in Berlin. In October 2025, the German Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs ruled that the Berlin daily Junge Welt could not hire him as an editor: doing so would breach the EU’s “prohibition on making funds available to a sanctioned person” and constitute a criminal offence. Doğru was, in effect, banned from his profession. Anyone who sent him money or let him sleep on their couch risked prosecution. “I’m not allowed to exist anymore,” Doğru told Ali Abunimah of the Electronic Intifada. “I’m not allowed to provide my children with the basic necessities.” On July 3, 2025, Doğru filed suit for annulment in the General Court of the EU.
Nathalie Yamb was sanctioned on June 26. 2025. She is fifty-six years old, born in the Swiss Jura, a dual citizen of Switzerland and Cameroon, and one of the most recognizable pan-African commentators in the francophone world. Her politics belong to the Alliance of Sahel States, the successor governments in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger that have expelled French troops, renounced the CFA franc, and reorganized themselves on a sovereigntist footing. In the European sanctions file, these positions appeared as evidence of her being a “vector of Russian influence” in Africa. No financial evidence was published. The designation rested on alignment of political aims.
By the end of 2025, a petition circulating out of Switzerland and Germany counted fifty-nine journalists, scholars, and activists designated under the Russia-related sanctions regimes in their various iterations since 2014. Among its signatories was Ninon Colneric, a former judge of the Court of Justice of the European Union who has jointly written a legal opinion arguing the underlying acts violate EU law on multiple grounds. The Council has continued to list.
Russia conducts information operations in Europe. Everyone agrees on this. On December 15, 2025, the same Council decision that listed Baud also listed three GRU officers tied to arson and sabotage on European soil. Viktor Medvedchuk’s Voice of Europe funded members of the European Parliament. RT and Sputnik, under an older sectoral regime, had their broadcasting licences suspended for running state-directed editorial operations. Those cases involve documented crimes or clearly documented state direction. They sit in a different category from the designation of Yamb for talking about sovereignty in Bamako, of Baud for quoting Zelensky’s former adviser, or of Doğru for reporting on Humboldt.
Hervé Letoqueux, chief executive of a disinformation-monitoring firm called Check First, told Euronews that the impact of Baud’s and other Western commentary on European public opinion was “relatively modest”—that the audiences were “already largely won over” to positions aligned with “conspiracy theorists and ultra-nationalists.” The Council sanctioned them anyway. The designation capacity is being built because a capacity that can reach Baud and Yamb can reach other people later, who may be more influential.
Washington moved the other direction. The U.S. State Department’s Global Engagement Center, created in 2016 to counter foreign terrorist propaganda, had by 2024 grown into a 125-person office with a $61 million budget and contracts with ratings firms like the Global Disinformation Index and NewsGuard whose effects reached domestic American media. Congress declined to renew its authorization in December 2024. Its successor office, R/FIMI, lasted four months: on April 16, 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio terminated it, saying the office had “actively silenced and censored the voices of Americans” and calling its continuation “inconceivable.” The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s foreign-disinformation staff were placed on leave; the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force was disbanded.
Europe and America faced the same question in 2025: where the line runs between countering foreign propaganda and regulating domestic political speech. They answered in opposite directions. The United States dismantled its public architecture. The European Union kept its architecture and added a coercive end-stage that freezes bank accounts.
The decade ahead, in the strategic-planning documents of every major Western government, appears in a common vocabulary: prolonged military posture against Russia, defense-spending increases that are reshaping fiscal politics across Europe, painful energy restructuring, persistent inflation, demographic squeeze, intensifying migration politics. The word that reliably appears in these documents is “resilience.” The phrase is “societal cohesion.” Both are euphemisms for the management of expected domestic discontent.
Inside that expectation, the pipeline Brussels has built has a specific shape. The EEAS identifies through its FIMI reports. The Council designates through its sanctions decisions. The payment networks enforce automatically. Member-state ministries—German Economic Affairs, Swiss SECO, the French Trésor—interpret the downstream consequences for employment, banking, and publishing. The Swiss federation, alone among European democracies, has declined to adopt the hybrid-threats framework. Baud, a Swiss citizen, is therefore not sanctioned in his country of citizenship. He is sanctioned only across the Union he has made his home.
The phrase du Cluzel chose in 2020—an embedded fifth column, where everyone, unbeknownst to himself, is behaving according to the plans of a competitor—was, when written, a sentence on a website. Five years later, the program whose doctrine the sentence set down is operational, the law that enforces it has been written, and the people who fit the category the doctrine describes are being identified, designated, and removed from commerce inside their own cities. The architecture was built quietly, by officials working without press scrutiny, inside institutions most of the alliance’s citizens would struggle to name. The pre-bunking ads run on European phones. The 77th Brigade’s domestic operations have been admitted in Parliament. A Swiss colonel’s friends carry groceries to his door. A Berlin journalist cannot legally accept a sandwich. NATO published the doctrine. The European Union wrote it into law. Nobody was asked.
