Cognitive Warfare

How NATO's War On Your Brain Became Law

NATO built a doctrine for a war fought inside the minds of its own citizens. The European Union built the law that enforces it. This is a report on what both have already done, to four specific people in five specific cities, before the reader finishes this paragraph.

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 with bread, cheese, vegetables, a bottle of wine, and typed in a delivery address in Brussels — a flat she had visited many times, whose owner, a friend of thirty years, could no longer leave Belgium and could no longer pay for anything from within it. She reached the checkout page and entered her Swiss card. 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, in an earlier career, had worked in Brussels for NATO, monitoring the flow of small arms into Ukraine. On 15 December 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.” The practical meaning was that his accounts had been frozen across the twenty-seven member states, that his travel across the Schengen area was forbidden, that his French publisher could not pay him the royalties owed on his last three books, and that any EU resident who sent him money — for rent, for medicine, for a sandwich — was committing a criminal offence. A friend in Bern trying to pay a Belgian delivery service for groceries ran the payment through the European payment network. The network blocked it. She called Baud and told him. Friends in Brussels began walking food to his door.

Baud had not been charged with a crime. He had never seen a judge. He had not been asked to account for his views by any authority with the power to hear him. 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 President 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. Removed from commerce. Left to the kindness of neighbours who could still physically carry groceries to his door.

The law that produced this condition is the enforcement arm of a military programme most Europeans have not heard of. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) has been running the programme since 2020, in Norfolk, Virginia, out of a unit called the Innovation Hub. The programme’s name is Cognitive Warfare. Its founding paper, now five years old, describes the 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.” Baud is a member of the fifth column, as the programme defines one. So is Hüseyin Doğru, a German journalist in Berlin whose wife’s bank account was frozen while she was pregnant, because she had married a man the Council had placed on the same kind of list seven months earlier. So is Nathalie Yamb, a Swiss-Cameroonian activist who spent August 2025 in Niamey being received by the Nigerien president, because she could no longer travel through Europe. What follows is a report on the programme that defined the category, and on the law that has begun to act on it.

On the afternoon of 5 October 2021, a retired French Army lieutenant-colonel named François du Cluzel logged into a videoconferencing system from his office in Norfolk and appeared on the screens of about two hundred viewers of a panel hosted by the NATO Association of Canada. The panel was moderated by Garrick Ngai, a marketing executive in the Canadian defence industry who served as an adviser to Canada’s Department of National Defence. It was introduced by the Association’s president, Robert Baines, who opened with the observation that participants would discuss “cognitive warfare and new domain of competition, where state and non-state actors aim to influence what people think and how they act.” Alongside du Cluzel on the panel sat Andy Bonvie, a commanding officer at the Canadian Special Operations Training Centre; Marie-Pierre Raymond, representing the Canadian Armed Forces’ Innovation Network; and Kristina Soukupova, a Czech researcher running a NATO project called DefSec at the Virtual Academy in Prague.

Du Cluzel had built the thing they were there to discuss. Between June and November of 2020 he had conducted a study for NATO’s Allied Command Transformation that had produced, in January 2021, a forty-five-page report on what it called the sixth domain of military operations. The first five were land, sea, air, cyber, and space. The sixth was the human mind. “Developing capabilities to harm the cognitive abilities of opponents will be a necessity,” the report stated. “Its field of action is global and aim[s] to seize control of the human being, civilian as well as military.” The report closed on a phrase its author labelled “ominous” — the fifth-column passage — and with a line that du Cluzel was fond of quoting: “The modern concept of war is not about weapons but about influence.”

On that October afternoon, the panel ran for about an hour, most of it consisting of slides and commentary on adversaries — Russian reflexive-control doctrine, Chinese investments in brain-machine interface research, the weaponisation of social media by state and non-state actors. Bonvie, the Canadian Special Operations officer, praised the report and said his command was already working cognitive warfare techniques into its routine combat training. Then the moderator opened the floor for questions from the online audience. An unnamed viewer typed in the question that mattered. It appears in the Innovation Hub’s own proceedings of the event: “If it is mandatory for a NATO member, not only pertaining to the United States, to protect our service members cognitively or does that extend to our populations?”

Du Cluzel’s answer, as recorded in those same proceedings, began with the word “population.” He said he thought it was a problem society would face as a whole. He said the cognitive domain went “way beyond our service members” and that NATO would “need to protect our population.” He did not say against whom. That part of the answer was implicit in the rest of the panel’s discussion and in the report he had written the year before: against the covert cognitive operations of foreign adversaries, chiefly Russia and China, whose effects on Western publics he and his colleagues believed were already detectable. In 2022 du Cluzel co-authored a second paper, with Professor Bernard Claverie of the École Nationale Supérieure de Cognitique in Bordeaux, that refined the concept. Cognitive warfare, the paper defined, combined “traditional and emerging technologies as well as measures above and below the threshold of war to achieve cognitive effects in an adversary’s population, as well as in their political and military leaders.” The phrase “adversary’s population” was not further defined.

In December 2025 — the same month Baud was sanctioned — the NATO Chief Scientist, Dr Bryan Wells, published the most authoritative public doctrinal statement the programme has produced, describing cognitive warfare as a cross-cutting dimension of all military domains, operating “below the threshold of armed conflict,” targeting “education, media, technology platforms, and public trust in institutions.” It arrived at the end of a five-year institutional build-out: the Innovation Hub in Norfolk, the Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence in Riga, the Virtual Academy in Prague, a Community of Interest that meets continuously, chairs at ENSC Bordeaux, contractor relationships with Thales and IBM, and a pipeline of annual symposia in Bordeaux, Madrid, and elsewhere. A scholarly analysis of the NATO Allied Command Transformation concept, peer-reviewed in 2024, quotes NATO’s own 2023 framing documents identifying “a surge in anti-establishment populism” as a possible indicator of successful adversary cognitive operations in Western societies. Domestic political dissent, in this framing, appears in the evidence column for foreign manipulation.

What the NATO Association of Canada panel did, on 5 October 2021, was put the programme’s civilian reach on the public record. The architect of the programme confirmed it in answer to a direct question. No major North American or European news outlet reported the exchange. It was left to the Grayzone, the Canadian Patriot, MR Online, and Project Censored, outlets that most newsrooms treat with scepticism, to cover what had happened. In the four years since, no NATO body has walked the answer back.

Six months before du Cluzel’s panel answer, a more consequential thing had already been done in the country that hosted the panel. On 8 April 2020, two weeks after the Canadian Armed Forces had deployed twenty-four thousand personnel to assist civilian authorities with the pandemic response, the Canadian Joint Operations Command launched what it called an information operation. The operation’s stated purpose was to “shape” and “exploit” the information flowing to the Canadian public, to “head off civil disobedience” during the lockdowns, and to bolster the government’s public-health messaging. The techniques it planned to use had been developed by the Canadian Armed Forces during its counterinsurgency campaigns in Afghanistan. The federal cabinet had not asked for the operation and had not authorised it. The commanding general of CJOC, Lieutenant-General Mike Rouleau, and his staff believed they did not need to ask.

The chief of staff at CJOC was Rear Admiral Brian Santarpia. In an internal memorandum that later became part of the Canadian Forces’ investigation into what his command had done, Santarpia summed up his view of what the pandemic represented for the techniques his people had spent the previous decade refining in Kandahar. He wrote: “This is really a learning opportunity for all of us and a chance to start getting information operations into our (CAF-DND) routine.” The Canadian Joint Operations Command, the memo made plain, saw the pandemic — a civil emergency in which the country had asked its army for help — as an opportunity to rehearse on the Canadian public the information-shaping techniques it had developed against an Afghan insurgency. “A mindset,” the investigating officer later wrote, “that permeated the thinking at many levels of CJOC.”

On 13 April 2020, Chief of Defence Staff General Jonathan Vance, having been briefed by staff officers who had raised concerns about the legality and ethics of the operation, verbally suspended the campaign. He formalised the suspension on 2 May. He ordered retired Major-General Daniel Gosselin to investigate how CJOC had come to launch a domestic information operation without authorisation. The Gosselin Report was completed on 2 December 2020. It was not released. David Pugliese, the defence correspondent of the Ottawa Citizen, obtained a copy under the federal Access to Information Act and published its findings in September 2021.

What Pugliese revealed — and what CBC News subsequently confirmed through its own access-to-information reporting in June 2021 and again, in further detail, in March 2026 — was that Vance’s verbal suspension had not taken effect in all quarters of the Canadian military. Some elements of the campaign continued for another six months, particularly inside a unit called Joint Task Force Central, which kept running public-affairs, civil-military-cooperation, and influence activities on the Canadian public until Vance issued a written edict in November 2020. A separate intelligence-gathering project, not controlled by CJOC, was quietly harvesting social-media data on Black Lives Matter organisers in Ontario. A third unit, within CJOC, wrote more than fifty reports on political discourse around COVID-19. The soldiers running that unit were told to create anonymous social-media accounts to monitor “key regional actors” in Canadian politics; some of them, rather than go through the trouble of setting up cover accounts, used their personal Facebook and Twitter profiles. No one was disciplined. Wesley Wark, a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation and one of Canada’s most respected intelligence scholars, told CBC that the operation had taken place “in a kind of legal vacuum,” and that the vacuum “still fundamentally exists.”

The Canadian case is the clearest documented example of what the NATO doctrine was being written to support, and what some NATO-member militaries had already quietly begun to do. A peacetime civil emergency. A military asked to help. A military command that treated the emergency as a field exercise in techniques honed against a foreign insurgency. An internal investigation kept confidential until a journalist pried it loose. No prosecutions. No firings. By the time du Cluzel took questions in October 2021, Santarpia’s memo had been written, Vance’s order had been issued and partly ignored, and Gosselin’s report was sitting classified in a drawer. The doctrine being drafted in Norfolk gave conceptual coherence to something Western militaries had already started doing.

The law that would make the doctrine enforceable in the civil sphere was drafted in Brussels in the second half of 2024. On 8 October 2024, the Council of the European Union adopted Decision (CFSP) 2024/2643, establishing a sanctions framework against Russia’s so-called hybrid threats. The framework’s language was extraordinarily broad. It authorised 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 in the Union, in one of its Member States, or in a third country.” One of the grounds for designation was participation in “coordinated information manipulation and interference,” a phrase the body of the decision did not define in operational terms. The designation required no criminal conviction. It required no indictment. It required no judicial finding. It required a proposal drafted by the European External Action Service, adopted by the Council in closed session under Article 29 of the Treaty on European Union, and published the following morning in the Official Journal. The freeze took effect on publication.

In May 2025, the Council broadened the framework’s scope. The same day, under Decision 2025/966, it added twenty-one individuals and six entities to the list. Two of the listed individuals were German citizens living in Russia — Alina Lipp and Thomas Röper, who operated pro-Kremlin blogs of the old RT/Sputnik type. A third, living in Germany, was a journalist named Hüseyin Doğru.

Doğru was thirty-six years old, born in Berlin to Turkish parents. He 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 in May 2024; its interviewers had spoken to Greta Thunberg; its footage had documented the German police’s forcible clearance of protest spaces. The outlet was small and left-wing. It drew its staff from a generation of Berlin journalists whose political sympathies placed them to the left of the German mainstream and outside the editorial tolerance of most of the country’s established media. The taz, an old Berlin daily of the soft-liberal left, had begun accusing red of serving Russian interests a few months earlier, citing the Russia-adjacent CVs of some of red’s staff. The EEAS Strategic Communications Division’s annual FIMI threat report, published in March 2025, had named red. Two months after that listing, 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 and barred from leaving Germany. He was placed on a €506 monthly subsistence allowance, released through the Bundesbank after a multi-week approval process. The average rent for a one-bedroom flat in Berlin is over a thousand euros a month.

In the months that followed, the German state completed the practical logic of the designation. In October 2025, the Berlin daily junge Welt — a left-wing paper that had taken an interest in Doğru’s case — enquired at the German Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs whether it could hire him as an editor. The ministry replied that to do so would breach the EU’s “prohibition on making funds available to a sanctioned person” and would constitute a criminal offence. Doğru was, in effect, banned from his profession. Anyone who sent him money, bought him a coffee, or let him sleep on their couch risked prosecution under German criminal law. In the first months of 2026, Doğru told Ali Abunimah of the Electronic Intifada, “I’m not allowed to exist anymore. I’m not allowed to provide my children with the basic necessities.” The sanctions dossier his lawyers had been permitted to see, he said, consisted overwhelmingly of his own reporting and of his social-media posts. In May 2025, a member of the European Parliament filed a written question asking the Council to confirm whether any member state had produced evidence of financial or organisational links between Doğru and Russian state media. The Council did not publicly answer. On 3 July 2025, Doğru and AFA Medya filed suit for annulment in the General Court of the European Union, Case T-429/25.

No major German newspaper reported the Doğru case at length. Der Spiegel did not cover it. FAZ did not cover it. The Süddeutsche Zeitung did not cover it. The coverage, Doğru told Abunimah, had come almost exclusively from smaller left-wing outlets. The speaker of the German Foreign Ministry, asked about the case at a press briefing in February 2026, described the EU sanctions regime as a useful tool and thanked a reporter for making its application known. The newspaper the journalist represented, the Berliner Zeitung, was among the handful that had covered the case. The silence of the mainstream German press on the sanctioning of a German journalist in his own country was the atmosphere in which the policy had become possible.

Nathalie Yamb was sanctioned on 26 June 2025, four weeks after Doğru. She is fifty-six years old, born in La Chaux-de-Fonds in the Swiss Jura, a dual citizen of Switzerland and Cameroon, and one of the most recognisable 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, over the past four years, expelled French troops from their territories, renounced the CFA franc monetary zone, and begun reorganising themselves on a sovereigntist footing. In the French political imagination, Yamb is one of the most articulate public faces of that turn. In the European sanctions file, the same facts appeared as evidence of her being a “vector of Russian influence” in Africa — through her alleged ties to an organisation called AFRIC, which the Council said was linked to a Russian private military company. No financial evidence was published. The designation rested on an alignment of political aims.

Her Swiss bank accounts were frozen within a day. Her travel through Europe was blocked. She was in Switzerland when the listing came through, which meant she was in Switzerland still. She could not leave to see her mother turn eighty, in August. She could not fly to meet her first grandchild, a baby boy born to her son. On 11 August 2025, however, she was received in Niamey by General Abdourahamane Tiani, the Nigerien transitional president, who named her a special adviser to his office and issued her a Nigerien diplomatic passport. The passport did not make her travel through Europe any easier. It did make a point.

“An African woman who talks about sovereignty?” Yamb wrote on her Telegram channel the week her sanctions were published. “Obviously a puppet. A Black woman who denounces exploitation? Naturally remote-controlled.” She has taken her case to the Court of Justice of the European Union. She has continued to broadcast from Lomé, from Ouagadougou, from Bamako. The EU still imports Russian gas and Russian fertiliser, she observed in one of her statements after the designation. A political analyst in Switzerland, she said, was easier to freeze than a pipeline.

On 15 December 2025 — the day Baud was listed — the Council added to its roster Xavier Moreau, a French former military officer based in Moscow who runs a commentary platform there, and five experts associated with the Russia-based Valdai Club. Moreau is a thinner case than Baud, Doğru, or Yamb: he is based in the country whose interests he is accused of serving, and his audience is chiefly Russian-speaking. His designation operates less like a sanction and more like a formal inscription into the enemy category. The Valdai experts sit in a similar register.

By the end of 2025, a petition circulating out of Switzerland and Germany counted fifty-nine journalists, scholars, and analysts designated under the Russia-related sanctions regimes in their various iterations. The figure aggregates across the original 2014 measures against state broadcasters, the 2022 wartime listings, and the 2024 hybrid-threats framework under which Baud, Doğru, and Yamb are held. The petition’s signatories include Ninon Colneric, a former judge of the Court of Justice of the European Union, and Alina Miron, a legal scholar at the University of Angers. Colneric and Miron have jointly written a legal opinion arguing that the underlying acts violate EU law on multiple grounds. Their opinion has been lodged with the Council. The Council has continued to list.

The Russian Federation conducts information operations in Europe. That is not disputed. On 15 December 2025, the same Council decision that listed Baud also listed three GRU officers — two of them identified as members of the Russian military intelligence service’s unit 29155 — whom German and Czech authorities had tied to arson and sabotage operations on European soil. Ukraine’s former Kremlin-linked political fixer Viktor Medvedchuk, along with his associate Artem Marchevskyi, had been funding the Voice of Europe media operation that channelled cash to members of the European Parliament in the run-up to the 2024 European elections. RT and Sputnik, under an older sectoral sanctions regime dating from the 2014 annexation of Crimea, had had their broadcasting licences in Europe suspended for running what the European Commission assessed as editorially state-directed operations.

All of those are real cases. Some of them — the GRU unit, the Medvedchuk cash — involve documented crimes or clearly documented state direction. Others — the broadcasting licences of RT and Sputnik — are administrative measures against state-owned outlets, of the kind most jurisdictions apply to entities openly controlled by foreign governments. None of those cases resemble the designation of Nathalie Yamb for talking about sovereignty in Bamako, or of Jacques Baud for quoting a former adviser to Zelensky, or of Hüseyin Doğru for reporting on a student encampment at Humboldt.

Hervé Letoqueux, the chief executive of a disinformation-monitoring firm called Check First, told the fact-checking desk of Euronews in December 2025 that the impact of Baud’s and Moreau’s commentary on European public opinion was “relatively modest.” Their audiences, he said, were “already largely won over” to positions aligned with “conspiracy theorists and ultra-nationalists.” The Council sanctioned them anyway. What Letoqueux’s assessment illuminates is the disjunction between the sanctions regime’s stated purpose — deterring effective foreign influence — and the profile of the people it has reached. The designation capacity is being built because a capacity that can reach Baud and Yamb can reach other people later, who may be influential.

Washington, where the instinct toward a similar architecture also existed, has gone the other direction. The US State Department’s Global Engagement Center had been created by Barack Obama in March 2016 with an initial mandate to counter foreign terrorist propaganda. It had grown into a one-hundred-and-twenty-five-person office with a sixty-one-million-dollar budget, a dense web of contracts with third-party ratings firms — the Global Disinformation Index, NewsGuard — and a practice of funding instruments whose effects reached domestic American media. By 2024, the Center had become a principal target of American conservative complaints about federal “censorship.” On 23 December 2024, Congress declined to renew its authorisation and the Center closed. The Biden administration, in its final weeks, established a successor office called Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI) within the State Department, with a reduced budget and forty staff.

R/FIMI lasted four months. On the morning of 16 April 2025, its employees were summoned to an 11:15 a.m. meeting and told they were being placed on administrative leave and would be terminated within thirty days. The order came from Marco Rubio, the new secretary of state, who said the office had “actively silenced and censored the voices of Americans” and called its continuation “inconceivable.” The same month, the Trump White House placed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s foreign-disinformation staff on administrative leave; the Department of Justice scaled back enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act and disbanded the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s Foreign Malign Influence Center remained in place, conducting analogous analytic work inside the intelligence community’s classification architecture, with no public-facing footprint.

Europe and America, in 2025, faced the same underlying question about 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, conceded the ground to those who had accused it of censorship, and placed the analytical function behind the classification wall. The European Union kept its architecture and added a coercive end-stage: a list that freezes bank accounts.

The decade for which the machinery now running out of Brussels is being built appears in outline across the strategic-planning documents of every major Western government: the British Ministry of Defence’s Global Strategic Trends projections, the European Defence Agency’s Capability Development Plan, the scenario-planning documents issued by Rand and by the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. In their sober technical language the word that reliably appears is “resilience,” which is the language of civilian preparedness, and the phrase that reliably appears is “societal cohesion,” which is the language of managing discontent. The doctrine assumes civil unrest as a baseline condition of the years ahead.

Inside that assumption, the pipeline Brussels has built over the last eighteen months has a specific shape. The European External Action Service’s Strategic Communications Division identifies through its FIMI reports. The Council designates through its sanctions decisions. The payment networks enforce automatically. Member-state ministries — the German Ministry of Economic Affairs, the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs, the French Trésor — interpret the downstream consequences for employment, banking, and publishing. A hearing on 11 November 2025 before the European Council itself heard testimony from Colneric, Miron, and other European legal scholars arguing that the regime as currently operated violates EU law and the European Convention on Human Rights on multiple grounds. The Council continued to list. In January 2026 it added six more individuals. In March it added four more.

The one European state that has refused to import the framework is Switzerland. The Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs has adopted every one of the sectoral EU sanctions packages against Russia since February 2022 but declined, in October 2024, to adopt the hybrid-threats framework, for reasons its officials have declined to state publicly in detail but which it has privately indicated to cabinet-level interlocutors: the regime sits outside the criminal-law framework, lacks judicial oversight, and is open-ended in its grounds. It is, in other words, the kind of instrument a small neutral federation with a strong free-speech tradition has instincts against. Baud, a Swiss citizen, is consequently not sanctioned in the country of his citizenship. He is sanctioned only across the Union he has made his home.

The phrase François du Cluzel chose in 2020 — “an embedded fifth column, where everyone, unbeknownst to him or her, is behaving according to the plans of one of our competitors” — was, at the time he wrote it, a sentence in a paper on a website. Five years later, the programme whose doctrine the paper set down is operational, the law that enforces the doctrine has been written, and the people who fit the category the doctrine describes are being identified and designated and removed from commerce inside their own cities. The architecture that makes it possible was built quietly, across five years, by officials working mostly without press scrutiny, inside institutions most of the alliance’s citizens would struggle to name. It runs now. Its first designated subjects are a Swiss colonel in Brussels whose friends carry groceries to him by hand, a German journalist in Berlin who cannot legally be offered a sandwich, and a Swiss-Cameroonian activist in Lomé who cannot fly home. Whatever it is built to do next, the evidence of what it can do now is already in the file.

Sources

Primary EU legal instruments

• Council Decision (CFSP) 2024/2643 of 8 October 2024 — framework

• Council Decision (CFSP) 2025/963 of 20 May 2025 — broadened scope

• Council Decision (CFSP) 2025/966 of 20 May 2025 — May listings (Doğru, Lipp, Röper, AFA Medya)

• Council Decision (CFSP) 2025/1443 of 15 July 2025 — July listings

• Council Decision (CFSP) 2025/2572 of 15 December 2025 — December listings (Baud, Moreau, Valdai experts)

• European Parliament written question P-002725/2025 (Doğru)

• Case T-429/25 (Doğru and AFA Medya v Council)

Primary NATO doctrinal documents

• François du Cluzel, “Cognitive Warfare,” NATO Innovation Hub, January 2021

• Claverie & du Cluzel, “The Cognitive Warfare Concept,” 2022

• NATO Chief Scientist Research Report on Cognitive Warfare, December 2025

• NATO Innovation Hub, “Open Innovation – Cognitive Warfare Use Case” proceedings (9 November 2021) — contains the 5 October 2021 panel exchange including Du Cluzel’s “protect our population” answer

• NATO ACT Cognitive Warfare landing page

• Peer-reviewed analysis of the NATO ACT concept (Frontiers in Big Data, 2024) — quotes the NATO “anti-establishment populism” framing

Canadian case — mainstream reporting

• CBC News, “Military campaign to influence public opinion continued after defence chief shut it down” (June 2021)

• CBC News, “Canadian military members violated intelligence-gathering rules during pandemic operation” (March 2026)

• Ottawa Citizen / National Post, David Pugliese on the Gosselin investigation (September 2021)

US case — mainstream reporting

• MIT Technology Review on R/FIMI’s closure (April 2025)

• Tech Policy Press on the GEC’s dismantling (April 2025)

• Defense One on the downstream effects (April 2025)

Baud — mainstream reporting

• SWI swissinfo.ch, “Former Swiss intelligence officer targeted by new EU sanctions” (December 2025)

• SWI swissinfo.ch, “Ex-Swiss intelligence officer to appeal EU sanctions” (December 2025)

• SWI swissinfo.ch, “Sanctioned former Swiss intelligence officer granted humanitarian waiver” (February 2026)

• Euronews, “Who are the Westerners sanctioned by the EU for spreading Russian propaganda?” (December 2025)

• Costas Lapavitsas, “Jacques Baud and the Demise of the EU as a Liberal Project” (Brave New Europe, December 2025)

• The Brawl Street Journal, “Sanctions Come Home” (December 2025) — on the Arestovych quote parallel

Baud — food-delivery and interview sourcing

• Eva Bartlett / “The Communists,” with direct interview quotations (January 2026) — original source of the grocery-delivery account, drawn from Baud’s Dialogue Works interview, late December 2025

Doğru

• Peoples Dispatch on Red.media’s closure (May 2025)

• WSWS on the Ministry of Economic Affairs ruling on employment (October 2025)

• Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah interview with Doğru (February 2026)

• Bianet on the subsistence-allowance detail (2026)

• Hüseyin Doğru’s own account at DiEM25 (June 2025)

• Robert Dale, Counterfire (March 2026)

Yamb

• Seneweb on Yamb’s reception by Tiani in Niamey (August 2025)

• EUvsDisinfo’s treatment of Yamb’s “racist and colonialist” response — primary record of the Council’s rationale and Yamb’s counter-claim

• Felix Abt, “Arbitrary, Brutal Suppression of Freedom of Expression” (January 2026) — contains Yamb’s Telegram quotations

Petition and legal challenges

• Free Jacques Baud petition (English)

• Free-Baud.org — with names and statements from Colneric and Miron

EEAS / EUvsDisinfo institutional primary sources

• EEAS FIMI landing page

• EUvsDisinfo “About”

• 4th EEAS FIMI Threat Report (2025)