The most dangerous Russian information operation may not begin with a lie. It may begin with something true. A legitimate news report. An authentic photograph. A real grievance. Russia’s information operators need not manufacture the informational environment when Western societies produce credible material every hour. They can enter that stream, identify narratives with emotional or political weight, and introduce just enough distortion to change their meaning. The cauldron is already full. The task is to keep it hot, stir selectively, and add synthetic ingredients slowly enough so that audiences struggle to see where fact ends and manipulation begins.

The problem is that there the contamination is increasing. Manipulated narratives are posted  beside authentic information, counterfeit sites resemble legitimate journalism, artificial personas discuss genuine disputes, and real reporting is reframed until audiences carry the distortion forward. The U.S. Department of Justice’s 2024 disruption of the Russian-directed Doppelganger operation offers a documented example. Russian actors used 32 domains, websites mimicking legitimate media, AI-assisted advertisements, fabricated personas, and influencers to promote state narratives while concealing their origins.

Credibility itself can become exploitable terrain. Operators need not make audiences trust Russia; they can exploit something familiar long enough for a manipulated interpretation to take hold. A counterfeit article borrows a newspaper’s authority. A false account gains plausibility from an authentic conversation. A manipulated video is posted beside genuine footage which exploits viewers’ difficulty from distinguishing them.

The European External Action Service’s 2025 threat report described hundreds of domains, coordinated networks, multiple languages, and localized content aimed at undermining democracy and support for Ukraine. It linked Russian information activity to drone incursions, sabotage, and attacks on critical infrastructure.

This creates a bait-and-switch dynamic, which is an analytical description, not a formal Russian doctrinal term. The bait is real: a military incident, economic grievance, election controversy, or historical argument. The switch changes its frame. An authentic report receives a fabricated caption, a real photograph is assigned to the wrong location, or a genuine speech is shortened until its meaning changes. The altered version moves faster than the original.

AI increases the volume. Before Moldova’s 2025 parliamentary election, researchers documented Russian-linked activity using generated articles, spoofed Western media sites, fabricated allegations, artificial personas, and engagement networks. The Associated Press reported that some operations imitated serious journalism. Repeated exposure can leave people unsure whether anything deserves trust.

Synthetic artifacts force verification. Journalists check images; analysts trace provenance; governments coordinate attribution; fact checkers reconstruct timelines. Meanwhile, contaminated narratives keep moving. Screenshots survive debunking, clips circulate without corrections, and translations lose context. The advantage may be less about convincing everyone of one falsehood than forcing institutions and publics to argue over what happened.

Synthetic media also creates a “liar’s dividend.” Once audiences know audio, photographs, and video can be fabricated, authentic evidence faces an added burden of proof. A fake can impersonate reality, while genuine evidence can be dismissed as fake. Fabricated material may be accepted and authentic material rejected.

Influence need not dictate a decision directly. It can alter the information surrounding it until a preferred choice seems reasonable. Hesitation may appear prudent, even when adversarial activity helped create uncertainty. This is why NATO Allied Command Transformation’s work on cognitive warfare matters. It focuses on manipulating perception, trust, judgment, cohesion, and decision-making, not simply content. Small shifts in confidence or willingness to act can affect coordination and decision speed.

The September 2026 Narrative Strategy Symposium in Arlington reflected this broader concern, examining influence warfare, artificial intelligence, narrative strategy, and societal resilience. Narrative security cannot be separated easily from decision security. The question is whether institutions retain enough confidence in their information to act before uncertainty becomes strategically useful to an adversary.

Russia can exploit an existing narrative, introduce manipulated material, surround it with apparent corroboration, and amplify it across channels. Disagreement fragments audiences. Screenshots, search results, commentary, and translations preserve those fragments. Later audiences may encounter the derivative narrative before the original evidence. The false trail begins generating its own apparent history.

These activities create a strategic asymmetry. Western institutions face expectations of evidence, attribution, transparency, and credibility. Russia can produce ambiguity faster than democratic institutions can resolve it, then portray their caution as weakness or concealment. The response cannot simply be to debunk more content. Verification must be paired with rapid authentication, transparent attribution, and clear communication about what is known, what remains uncertain, and why. Institutions should make credible evidence accessible before manipulated versions dominate the conversation. Resilience means preserving the ability to make timely, evidence-based decisions under uncertainty, not eliminating uncertainty altogether.

There is also a danger to overcorrecting. If governments label inconvenient reporting or legitimate dissent as foreign interference without sufficient evidence, they risk damaging the very credibility they seek to protect. Effective responses must distinguish coordinated hostile manipulation from authentic journalism and domestic disagreement. Otherwise, defensive measures can reinforce suspicions that adversaries are trying to cultivate.

Deterrence depends on beliefs about capability, credibility, cohesion, and willingness to act. If Russian leaders see prolonged attribution disputes and hesitation driven by information contamination, they may misread confusion as political weakness. The risk is not only persuasion, but misperception produced by uncertainty Russia helped create.

Russian information operations are not simply a contest between truth and falsehood. The battlefield is the boundary between them, where credibility can be borrowed to weaponize authentic evidence and repetition can manufacture apparent corroboration. Digital debris becomes tomorrow’s source material, giving operators another chance to stir the cauldron.

The cauldron need not produce one dominant narrative. It only needs enough Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference in enough languages to consume attention, divide interpretation, and delay confidence. Russia does not have to make the world believe Moscow. It may be enough to keep the world arguing with itself while synthetic narratives harden into political positions and shape the next crisis before the last is understood.

Stirring the cauldron does not have to break the geopolitical system. It only must stay warm.

Mr. Greg Sharpe is a Fellow and the director of Communications and Marketing for the National Institute for Deterrence Studies and the Managing Design Editor for the Global Security Review. He has 25+ years in marketing and communications with a focus on digital communications, organizational and institutional change, and analysis. Greg has over 45 years of military, federal civilian, and defense contractor experience in the fields of database development, digital marketing & analysis, technology use case exploration, and assessment, and as a USAF Doctrine outreach and engagement analyst. Views expressed are his own.

The Cauldron Never Empties: Synthetic Narratives that Create Strategic Opportunity was originally published on Global Security Review.

The State Department’s “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism” report and the independent assessment by resilience and resistance interdisciplinary scholar Dr. Robert Burrell both address important but differing views. The State Department examines how Havana converted limited conventional power into a durable system of espionage, ideological influence, proxy relationships, and political subversion. Burrell examines why the Cuban regime continues to survive economic decline, sanctions, demographic pressure, and public unrest. One follows the outward projection of power, the other measures the internal foundations of authoritarian durability. Together, they offer a useful composite picture. Yet both stop short of the assessing what is most necessary, whether Cuba has contemporary value as a strategic access platform for Russia, China, and Iran. 

First is that Cuba has transitioned from a revolutionary exporter to an enabling platform. Cuba no longer needs to export revolution on the scale of the 1960s to remain strategically consequential. Instead, it can leverage geography, diplomatic cover, intelligence tradecraft, Spanish-language credibility, telecommunications access, port facilities, and a tightly controlled operating environment ninety miles from Florida. These activities connect to the modern cognitive warfare apparatus. NATO defines cognitive warfare as synchronized activity intended to influence, protect, or disrupt cognition to affect attitudes and behavior. Through that lens, Cuba is more than a messenger. It can serve as an intermediary that helps foreign narratives acquire regional identity, historical legitimacy, and attributional distance. 

Russia’s Cuban provision is one of proximity, access, and narrative localization. Russian information operations in Latin America benefit when themes originating in Moscow are restated through Cuban institutions, sympathetic regional outlets, diplomatic networks, or established anti-imperialist frames. These themes can appear less like foreign intervention and more like an indigenous critique of U.S. power. The 2025 U.S. Southern Command statement described Russian, Chinese, and Iranian cyber espionage and information operations across the region and discussed the 2024 Russian naval visit to Havana. That activity did not establish an imminent attack, but demonstrated how access, intelligence collection, and messaging can be leveraged. 

China’s Cuban provision is more infrastructural, known as cognitive infrastructure: the telecommunications, data, sensing, media, and analytical systems through which perceptions can be studied and influence delivered. CSIS satellite-imagery assessments have identified Cuban facilities containing equipment potentially capable of signals-intelligence collection while appropriately treating Chinese involvement as a possibility requiring continued evaluation rather than a conclusively established fact. 

At first glance, many access points Cuba provides to China may appear innocuous. They are simply telecommunications upgrades, academic exchanges, commercial partnerships, port visits, research cooperations, media engagements, or technical assistance. Individually, these activities can be explained as routine state-to-state transactional relations. Their strategic significance emerges through accumulation. Each interaction creates another opportunity to observe institutional routines, social networks, political reactions, military patterns, and regional audience vulnerabilities. Over time, persistent collection can transform ordinary access into a developing exploitation infrastructure. 

Cuba’s value in this process is not limited to geography. Its controlled political environment, security institutions, regional relationships, and proximity to the U.S. can provide China with a discreet platform from which engagements may gradually support intelligence partnerships, narrative targeting, and future cognitive influence. 

Iran’s Cuban provision is wholly different. It is built around sanctions solidarity, diplomatic reach, technical cooperation, and hemispheric access. Evidence does not indicate a substantial Iranian combat presence in Cuba.  

Iranian Spanish-language messaging, resistance narratives, and anti-sanction’s themes can reinforce Cuban and Russian accounts without requiring a single integrated command structure. The three states can repeat complementary claims portraying the U.S. as coercive, destabilizing, culturally hostile, or economically predatory. Repetition across separate national and media sources can produce narrative convergence, giving audiences the impression that multiple independent observers have reached the same conclusion. 

Second is the separation of Cuban regime resilience from external influence capacity. Intelligence services, security institutions, elite cohesion, and foreign assistance do not merely explain Cuban survival. They also make Cuba useful to foreign actors by protecting personnel, concealing sensitive agreements, disciplining state media, and preserving long-duration access. Economic weakness may therefore increase Havana’s willingness to exchange infrastructure access, intelligence cooperation, political support, or technological privileges for energy, credit, and regime security. 

Third is the absence of a Cuban campaign continuum. Cuba-enabled competition could progress from commercial investment, diplomatic exchanges, media partnerships, and technical assistance into secure facilities, persistent foreign personnel, expanded data access, port familiarity, intelligence sharing, cyber staging, and coordinated crisis narratives. Visible military deployment might appear only at the far end. By then, much of the cognitive preparation could already be complete. U.S. audiences may become divided over attribution. Regional governments may become reluctant to cooperate. And policymakers will become uncertain whether responding to a limited provocation would produce escalation. 

Fourth is the institutional perception risk inside the U.S. Cuba’s intelligence success has never depended solely on stealing secrets. Long-duration penetration can also shape what institutions believe is important, which warning indicators they discount, and how threats are categorized. The conviction of former U.S. ambassador and National Security Council official Victor Manuel Rocha for secretly acting for Cuba over decades demonstrates the patience and access Cuban intelligence can achieve. The cognitive effect of penetration is therefore larger than the information removed. 

CONCLUSION 

The State Department report and the Cuban independent assessment are useful, but each risks treating Cuba as an isolated problem rather than as a strategic access point for larger adversarial powers. Cuba is better understood as a strategic doorway, an authoritarian platform whose value increases when connected to the resources of larger powers. Russia can use it to localize narratives and signal proximity. China can use it to gain access to data, sensing, and infrastructure. Iran can use it to extend diplomatic and informational reach into the hemisphere. 

The missed threat is therefore not a Cuban conventional assault. It is the gradual construction of an ecosystem in which foreign collection, political access, information laundering, cyber opportunity, and cognitive pressure converge near the American homeland. Cuba’s economy may be failing; its strategic utility is not. 

Greg Sharpe is a Fellow and the director of Communications and Marketing for the National Institute for Deterrence Studies and the Managing Design Editor for the Global Security Review. He has 25+ years in marketing and communications with a focus on digital communications, organizational and institutional change, and analysis. The views of the author are his own. 

Cognitive Warfare at America’s Edge was originally published on Global Security Review.