6th November 2026
Andy Burnham’s announcement of the creation of a “National Centre for Information Defence” at the UN last month highlighted Russia’s well-funded campaign of information manipulation and its methods. But a mere defensive approach will not be enough, argues Oliver Gill. The UK must also engage in offensive operations if it’s to neutralise the Kremlin’s hybrid aggression.
During his recent address to the United Nations General Assembly, Prime Minister Andy Burnham brought hostile cognitive and information operations – more commonly known as disinformation – to the centre of the UK’s foreign policy agenda. Announcing the creation of a new “National Centre for Information Defence” (NCID), Burnham revealed that the Kremlin now deploys roughly £1.3bn annually on information manipulation, weaponising tools ranging from forged BBC and university branding to generative AI systems which “multiply the threat”.
Yet this flagging of the adversary’s technical apparatus captures only the surface of the problem. Moscow’s long lineage of “active measures” and psychological operations has found a powerful amplifier in the speed, scale, and algorithmic targeting capability with the ever-increasing sophistication and power of AI models and compute. While establishing the NCID is a positive step, a strictly defensive perimeter designed merely to filter and debunk hostile content within domestic borders will not deter our adversaries. To effectively neutralise and counter Russian hybrid aggression, the UK must integrate policies of domestic societal resilience with offensive operations disrupting Russia’s efforts and imposing consequences directly upon the Kremlin and Moscow’s elites.
The Reality of Russian Cognitive Aggression
The ultimate objective of Russian information and cognitive operations is not to persuade, but to paralyse, confuse, and isolate. Rather than attempting to impose an outside ideology, the Kremlin aims to degrade the quality and speed of democratic decision-making, erode trust in public institutions, and neutralise the UK’s capacity to confront external aggression. Their strategy preys on societal vulnerabilities by identifying existing domestic grievances – economic stagnation, regional disparities, institutional mistrust – and systematically drive wedges into these fractures until they widen into civic chasms. Today, Britain is Russia’s “number one” target.
As Burnham highlighted at the UN, these operations represent an: “insidious campaign that reaches into people’s homes and twists what they feel about their own country and community – creating a narrative of decline, stoking division and sowing despair”
Increasingly powerful AI models act as a force multiplier for this playbook, enabling the automated, high-volume production of targeted synthetic media, cloned news outlets, and astroturfing of social media engagement via swarms of bots.
To effectively neutralise and counter Russian hybrid aggression, the UK must integrate policies of domestic societal resilience with offensive operations disrupting Russia’s efforts and imposing consequences directly upon the Kremlin and Moscow’s elites.
Nothing illustrates the pervasive scale of Russian cognitive warfare quite like its abrupt abeyance. While analysts continue to debate the precise forensic metrics behind recent Ukrainian strikes on Russian data infrastructure, the reported lull in automated bot activity serves as an instructive diagnostic heuristic. Moscow’s automated amplification of domestic discord has become so normalized that we rarely register its presence. It takes such interruptions to reveal just how deeply hostile state networks saturate our digital discourse.
The UK is not alone in this – all democracies are a threat to autocracies. France and the EU are investigating whether Russian information and bot networks amplified false and polarising information during France’s recent student protests. This is a prime example of the pattern. Russia is not accused of catalysing the protests, but of seizing them as an opportunity to “fuel the fire” of domestic instability. Hostile foreign actors rarely manufacture societal divisions ex nihilo. Rather they locate authentic domestic fractures and systematically amplify extreme voices on both sides of the aisle to paralyse democratic debate and decision making and alter the way we think.
Whole-of-Society Resilience as Baseline Defence
Building national cognitive resilience requires combining domestic socioeconomic repair, systemic public education, and technical institutional guardrails to the UK’s information defence apparatus. The Government must focus on maintaining an open and democratic conversation on our national points of contention – on building national unity and consensus as we enter what are likely to be even more troubled times.
Secondly, we must look to our allies closer to Russia which have been experiencing, dealing with, and thus aware of the threat for a long time. Estonia in particular is an excellent case of how educational and government policy can produce real resilience to information warfare: a mandatory “media and manipulation” 35 hour course is taught to all school children, with the further option in secondary school to take a 70 hour course on “National Defence“. Estonia regularly ranks amongst the top scorers in Europe for media literacy.
Alongside efforts to increase media literacy, the newly established NCID should mirror the model of the National Cyber Security Centre as a technical organisation focused on identifying, attributing, and disrupting hostile information activities, rather than policing domestic online rhetoric, as some fear it may.
Offense is the best form of defence – imposing costs for information aggression
As seasoned Russia-watchers recognise, we must break out of our habit of self-deterrence and meet Putin’s aggression with clear red lines and negative costs. Confining British strategy to domestic resilience amounts to playing entirely on our own goal line. This is an unsustainable strategy against an adversary that has been meddling in foreign discourse for over a century. Deterrence requires imposing real costs directly on the apparatus executing these attacks and the command structures ordering them.
Democracies retain an asymmetric advantage that autocracies lack: the truth. While Moscow expends vast resources repeating fabrications, penetrating the Kremlin’s domestic information blockade to deliver poignant truths(not least the catastrophic toll of an estimated 1.5 million Russian casualties in Ukraine) directly to grieving families and civil society offers potent strategic leverage. Piercing the regime’s pretexts of unprovoked Western aggression strikes at the core of Putin’s domestic vulnerability far more cost effectively than purely conventional procurement.
As seasoned Russia-watchers recognise, we must break out of our habit of self-deterrence and meet Putin’s aggression with clear red lines and negative costs.
In doing so we should integrate operational lessons from Ukraine. The proactive campaigns waged by Ukrainian Defence Intelligence (HUR), the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), and the Centre for Strategic Communication (Spravdi) demonstrate that active information manoeuvre such as pre-emptive intelligence declassification (releasing information to the public about the enemy´s intentions), network interdiction (operations to degrade the networks through which an adversary produces, coordinates, amplifies and delivers information effects), and narrative disruption consistently outmatch passive counter-messaging and merely ‘debunking’, an often ineffective and untimely tactic. High-confidence attribution generated by the National Centre for Information Defence (NCID) should feed directly into active disruption operations, responsibly executed by the National Cyber Force (NCF), and intelligence agencies. This might take the form of targeted cyber, informational, or intelligence operations carried out against the actors, organisations, or networks carrying out informational attacks on the UK.
A forward cognitive posture does not require emulating Moscow’s crude disinformation and buying into an “end to truth” narrative. Instead, the United Kingdom should impose friction on Russia’s information infrastructure. This would act as the outer shield needed to safeguard Britain’s domestic democratic discourse. If deterrence against a continental war with Russia is the national priority, the logic of deterrence dictates that a purely defensively minded stance on the perimeter is a half-measure. The Kremlin must be forced to reckon with democracies’ strength in the cognitive domain, and Burnham must address domestic issues of media literacy and tension frankly, while tasking our national security infrastructure to integrate the newly created NCID with a doctrine of forward defence.
Author
Oliver Gill is a Principal Researcher for the Democratic Resilience in a New Age of War Programme at LSE IDEAS and Managing Director of 0I0 Consulting. After completing his master's in international relations at King’s College London with a focus on information warfare and AI, his research now focuses on Russia's illegal war against Ukraine, defence innovation, and cognitive warfare."
Note
This article is from the London School of Economics blog. To readit with links to more information go
HERE
Articles can be copied under their CC agreements.