The auditorium at the Stockholm School of Economics is silent in a way that only happens when someone says something that hits right in the heart. Liubov Tsybulska stands at the podium in black, with the yellow and blue of the Ukrainian flag on the big screen behind her, and describes how Russia systematically uses information as a military weapon, with measurable consequences for people's lives, for political decisions, for the ability of entire societies to function. It's about the cost of turning a blind eye to what is already happening.
Tsybulska speaks with the kind of precision that comes from having lived inside the mechanisms for over a decade. She founded Ukraine’s Center for Strategic Communications and Information Security under the Ministry of Culture and was an advisor to the country’s Chief of Defense before starting the non-profit organization Join Ukraine in 2022. She traveled here to Stockholm from Kyiv, where it is currently minus ten degrees and Russia has chosen the coldest winter in years to systematically destroy the country’s energy system. In January, thousands of missiles and drones were fired at the infrastructure. Over a million people on Kiev’s left bank live without proper electricity and heating. Maxim Timchenko, CEO of Ukraine’s largest private energy company DTEK, recently put it bluntly: “We are close to a humanitarian catastrophe.
Tsybulska’s story extends far beyond the full-scale invasion. It begins in the Crimean peninsula, which Russia annexed in the spring of 2014 in what became the largest military annexation of another state’s territory in Europe since World War II. Information operations preceded the occupation, she explains. Narratives about Russian speakers being under threat were systematically established. The Maidan revolution, the popular uprising that had ousted pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych just days earlier, was delegitimized. Local support was manufactured. Armed soldiers without national designations were portrayed as harmless. The media landscape ensured that this alternative reality spread faster than anyone could verify the facts, and once the military phase became visible to the world, the information environment had already determined how the outside world would react.
Four months later, in July 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine. All 298 people on board were killed, most of them Dutch citizens returning from vacation. Tsybulska describes what happened in the briefing room immediately afterwards. Thirty competing explanations circulated in a very short space of time. State actors and proxies amplified conflicting narratives across multiple media platforms. The goal was never to convince the world of a single version of the event, but to delay attribution, fragment international consensus, politicize the investigation, and slow down a coordinated response. Information chaos served as a strategic shield, and in modern crises, the speed of clarification directly affects the speed of political decisions.
Then she shows a picture of Nord Stream 2, the gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea that was built to bring Russian natural gas directly to Germany, bypassing Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic states. The project became one of the most debated energy decisions in modern European history, and Tsybulska focuses on how the information environment around the project shaped Europe’s vulnerability in the years before the war. The project was consistently framed as commercial, reliable and neutral. Critics were dismissed as ideological or anti-business. Energy dependence was presented as a guarantee of stability. State communication, expert networks, lobbying ecosystems and the interaction between business interests and the media reinforced this perception for more than a decade. The result was long-term risk, the kind of risk that only becomes visible when it is realized. It took a full-scale war for Europe to understand its cost.
Then she comes to what makes the hall even quieter. Dehumanization as preparation for violence. Russian domestic propaganda has consistently portrayed Ukrainians as illegitimate, dangerous, or inferior, while depicting Europe and the West as decadent and morally degraded. Dehumanization serves a functional role, Tsybulska explains. It normalizes violence, reduces moral barriers among soldiers, maintains domestic support for the war, and justifies a prolonged conflict. From Kremlin-linked TV studios, the invasion is portrayed as civilizational defense. That is what Russia tells itself about why it is killing its neighbors.
There is a painful clarity in the way Tsybulska presents all this. An analysis of mechanisms, evidence by evidence, step by step. Perhaps it is precisely the objectivity that makes it impossible to look away. Towards the end of the lecture, she shows a slide with red text on a white background, a single sentence: “Trust is the crucial vulnerability, and the main defense.” The text remains in the room where we are sitting. Cognitive warfare, the term she uses, shifts the primary target from territory to perception. The operations aim to influence how people interpret reality, whom they trust, how they make decisions, and whether they act collectively. Society itself becomes the battlefield. And where trust is low, manipulation is easier and coordination is weaker.
I have come to meet Liubov and her colleagues at Join Ukraine through my work supporting the Psychological Defense Agency in their work in Ukraine, a collaboration that has meant that I have spent many years working on issues of hybrid threats, information influence, and societal resilience. During these years, I have seen how total defense is discussed in conference rooms and how it is investigated in strategy documents. But it is through my work with Join Ukraine, and authorities in Ukraine, that I have come to see and experience what it looks like when it becomes a reality. Join Ukraine runs a total defense program together with the Ukrainian Catholic University, with support from, among others, the Psychological Defense Agency, which brings together leaders from the military, public sector, civil society, media, and business. The program trains participants to navigate exactly the reality Tsybulska describes, a reality where military defense, resilience to hybrid threats, and cognitive warfare and civil cooperation cannot be kept separate. Join Ukraine collaborates with the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, the Security Service, the Territorial Defense, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Their video productions and other strategic communication for official government channels have reached out widely in society. Integrated civilian capacity in a country that is building its total defense during an ongoing war, and concrete proof of what is possible when civil society and the state actually collaborate.
Since February 2022, Sweden has contributed around SEK 114 billion in support to Ukraine. In September 2025, the Armed Forces and the Swedish Military and Security Service identified seven typical situations that the country needs to prepare for, with hybrid threats, information influence and sabotage as central elements. In January 2026, the government announced that a national strategy for psychological defense will be developed during the year. These are necessary steps. But what Ukraine's experience shows, and what Tsybulska expresses with emphasis, is that resilience built after a crisis is survival, while resilience built before a crisis is strategy. As well as we create conditions in peace, we have the conditions to act in war. That should be the starting point for everything.
Outside the windows of the School of Economics, people are hurrying through Stockholm in the February cold. Subway, morning coffee, strollers. The normal. Liubov Tsybulska traveled from Kyiv, a city that is bombed every week, a city where families live with three hours of electricity a day and warm themselves by the gas stove, to tell us what twelve years of information warfare have taught her. Trust is the foundation of defense in a democracy. We need to protect, nurture and strengthen that. Here and now. Every day.