Since the Soviet era, the Kremlin’s intelligence services have had a wide range of tools and networks of agents of influence to encourage Western societies to take actions favorable to Moscow. For American or Polish voters, it seems that significant political events seem to occur as a result of objective factors, but in practice, the policies of their top-rated political forces often develop in a way that is favorable to the Kremlin.
This is called covert control – a form of manipulation and programming of the behavior of leaders, political forces and societies through psychological influence on them. This influence is latent and aims to change people’s thoughts and actions in the direction needed by manipulators. The object, i.e. society or a part of it, is induced to solve a certain task in advance. A competent choice of technologies allows manipulators to achieve the planned results by forming acceptable social and effective algorithms in the mass consciousness.
These algorithms can be built through deliberate or, in some cases, spontaneous actions, but they lead the social groups needed by manipulators to “self-evident” decisions, although often well-faked options are presented as “obvious.” By spreading lies and slander, information fakes, exploiting existing contradictions and exaggerating the problems of society, the Kremlin has managed to stop military aid to Ukraine from our largest supplier and has achieved an economic blockade of Ukraine on the Polish border in the past few months.
Democracies are particularly vulnerable to manipulation by covert governance, and Moscow has always had its political and media resources in the West, which deepen existing sore spots. By instigating scandals, the Kremlin is able to remove unwanted Western politicians or force the resignation of governments that act too decisively against Moscow. The covert management of political processes works in such a way that sometimes events and processes become more obvious not during their detailed consideration, but from a historical and strategic retrospective. At first glance, the delay in American aid to Ukraine is due to the pre-election competition between the two largest parties, each of which is seeking to demonstrate achievements to voters, and Ukrainians have simply become hostages to the undercover game in the Capitol.
Of course, the Kremlin did not instruct Republicans to block aid to Ukraine. However, for some reason, the Kremlin has strategically benefited from the populist game on the pockets of ordinary Americans who have never spared money for their government’s foreign wars. Moscow has managed to use the internal squabbles of American democracy to block military aid to Ukraine, and it all looks like an internal American coincidence. Whatever the strategy of the American elite, over the past few months, exactly what Putin publicly suggested has happened is that Ukraine should stop being “pumped” with weapons.
Ukraine and Poland had a very similar quarrel. Not long ago, Warsaw and Kyiv were talking about the economic integration of the Three Seas, forming a joint military brigade with Lithuania, and civil societies in both countries were discussing the Intermarium defense initiative. All of these Polish-Ukrainian initiatives made the Kremlin’s master break out in a cold sweat. And they ended with scattered grain and announcements of a “temporary” suspension of trade.
Moscow, as in the past, is exacerbating misunderstandings and conflicts between Poles and Ukrainians and taking advantage of this. And Polish and Ukrainian societies do not have enough compromise power to marginalize such destructive tendencies. Moreover, the two nations are engaged in a trade war. The Poles do not let Ukrainian agricultural products through, and Ukrainians call for not buying Polish goods-all seemingly a response to injustice, but only the Kremlin benefits.
Refusing to play the role of a pawn in someone else’s game of hidden control is the first prerequisite for defeating the aggressor. However, Western capitals do not seem to believe that they have been chosen as pawns by covert influence.
Author: Valeriy Maydanyuk
