Influence Operations: The Other Front in Ukraine
Why the struggle to define the war matters as much as the fight itself
Since February 24, 2022, the public debate about the war in Ukraine has circled the same question: who is winning? Each shift in the front line triggers the same cycle. Maps are updated. Casualty estimates surface. Analysts argue over momentum. The discussion feels necessary. It is also incomplete.
The headlines of past weeks reflect this duality: “Vladimir Putin’s finally starting to sweat — so it’s time for Trump to turn up the heat;” “Ukraine Can’t Defend the Entire Front. Russia Is Finding the Gaps”; “Vladimir Putin is trapped in a war he cannot win but dare not end”; “Russian forces pressuring Pokrovsk as ‘last battles’ rage.”
The war is still being fought with artillery, drones, and infantry. But it is also being fought through something less visible and potentially more decisive: the shaping of belief.
This is not a new feature of war. States have always tried to shape perceptions at home and abroad. What is different in Ukraine is how central the perception battle has become to sustaining the conflict itself. Ukraine’s ability to continue fighting depends on external support. Russia’s best path to success may lie in weakening that support over time. That makes the information environment part of the operational environment.
The tactical picture has settled into a pattern that helps explain why this second front matters. Russia maintains the initiative across multiple sectors and continues to make incremental advances. Ukraine prevents decisive breakthroughs and preserves its defensive integrity. These facts are widely reported and broadly accepted. What they do not produce is resolution; they produce ambiguity.
And ambiguity is fertile ground for influence.
In fast wars, outcomes shape perception. In slow wars, perception shapes outcomes. During Vietnam, U.S. forces often prevailed tactically, but the Tet Offensive in 1968 demonstrated how perception could overwhelm battlefield reality. Militarily, the offensive was a failure for North Vietnam. Psychologically, it reshaped American expectations about the war’s trajectory. Confidence eroded. Political pressure mounted. Strategic direction changed.
The lesson has echoed through subsequent conflicts. The Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan produced similar dynamics. Tactical control of terrain did not translate into a sense of inevitability. The longer the war continued, the more it was interpreted as unwinnable. The system did not collapse on the battlefield. It eroded politically.
These precedents are not analogies in the sense of prediction. They are patterns. Influence operations work most effectively when wars are prolonged, costly, and ambiguous. They do not need to prove victory. They need to shape expectations about how the war will end.
Russia’s messaging about the Ukraine war has emphasized persistence, reach, and inevitability. Large-scale strikes on infrastructure and cities create images that travel across Europe and the United States. These images show capacity. They reinforce the sense of a country able to sustain pressure.
Moscow’s approach often focuses less on persuading audiences of specific facts and more on reinforcing broad narratives at scale. The objective is not to convince. It is to condition.
Conditioning works through repetition. A steady stream of reports about strikes, advances, and production capacity builds an environment in which the idea of eventual Russian success becomes plausible, even if the evidence is mixed. Over time, plausibility is enough.
Ukraine operates in the same environment but with different tools. Its messaging emphasizes resilience, legitimacy, and continuity. President Volodymyr Zelensky’s presence at international summits and legislative addresses serves multiple purposes. Each appearance reinforces the image of a functioning state still capable of mobilizing support. In a war where survival depends on external backing, visibility becomes a form of reassurance.
Even domestic decisions carry external significance. Zelensky’s acknowledgment that elections will eventually take place sends a message about stability and democratic continuity. That signal is not aimed at Moscow. It is aimed at partners whose support rests partly on shared political values and the message is simple: the state is still functioning.
We are living in a dual messaging environment. Russia projects inevitability. Ukraine projects endurance. Both are speaking, in part, to audiences outside the battlefield.
That matters because this war is not self-contained. It is sustained through decisions made in Washington, Brussels, Berlin, and other capitals. Those decisions are shaped by public perception as much as by classified reporting. When wars appear endless, support becomes harder to sustain. When outcomes appear uncertain, urgency grows.
The problem for most Western audiences is that the war’s most consequential military facts resist easy visual proof. Russia can show movement with a map and force with a strike package. Ukraine’s most important achievement—preventing strategic defeat—rarely looks like an achievement on screen. Defense is not cinematic. Successful logistics are invisible. Holding a line is an absence of disaster, not a spectacle of triumph.
That asymmetry is not accidental. It is exploitable. EUvsDisinfo’s tracking of recurring Kremlin narratives documents a steady storyline built around a weakened Ukraine, a fatigued West, and an inevitable negotiation on Russia’s terms. You don’t need every viewer to believe it. You need enough people to feel it might be true, and to treat continued support as throwing good money after bad.
The Kremlin’s “victory narrative” is not just aimed at morale at home; it is meant to shape bargaining space abroad—to make Russian gains feel permanent and Ukrainian resistance feel temporary. Imposing such a story can be strategically useful in a war where battlefield change is slow and the political appetite for ambiguity is limited.
If you want a real-world illustration, look at how “talks” have been covered over the last two weeks. The UAE-hosted Abu Dhabi track produced a prisoner exchange that different outlets have described as 157 per side (314 total) and framed as the only tangible outcome of the round. It was morally significant and politically useful, but strategically thin. Yet it generated headlines of motion in a process that otherwise remains stuck.
The same reporting underscores what keeps the track stuck. Moscow’s demands have remained maximalist—framed in language like “neutrality” and “demilitarization,” tied to territorial claims that extend beyond what Russia currently occupies, and paired with resistance to the kind of security guarantees Kyiv says are necessary to prevent a ceasefire from becoming a reset for a renewed attack. You can call that hard bargaining, but it also functions as agenda-setting: it forces every discussion to orbit Russia’s preferred end state.
This is where battlefield ambiguity and negotiation theater fuse. The Soufan Center’s February 10 brief (drawing on Institute for the Study of War assessments) describes Russia controlling nearly all of Luhansk and roughly 80% of Donetsk, while also noting that Russia lacks the offensive capacity for rapid operational goals in the short term. That combination—real territorial leverage, paired with limited near-term capacity for decisive victory—creates incentives to convert pressure into terms rather than chase a clean breakthrough.
Ukraine’s counter-strategy is not simply “hold the line.” It is “hold legitimacy.” Zelensky’s constant travel—summits, parliaments, security conferences—does what war leaders have always done when they need outside backers: it keeps the coalition emotionally and politically invested. Even when battlefield news is grim, a leader standing at Munich or Brussels communicates continuity in a way that casualty charts cannot.
And U.S. opinion is not a blank canvas. Pew’s polling has tracked persistent partisan division over whether the U.S. is doing too much or too little for Ukraine, even as toplines move modestly. Gallup has found broad pessimism that a peace agreement will be reached, alongside strong concern that any agreement could either favor Russia or be violated by Russia. That is not a public primed for open-ended ambiguity; it is a public primed for arguments about the risks of any outcome.
Europe complicates Russia’s preferred story, which is why Moscow spends so much effort narrating European fatigue. The Kiel Institute’s Ukraine Support Tracker reports that total aid allocated to Ukraine remained relatively stable in 2025 despite the halt of U.S. support, because Europe expanded its contributions sharply—while also noting that overall military aid fell below the 2022–2024 average due to the U.S. gap and that military aid is increasingly borne by a small number of countries. That is a counter-narrative with a stress fracture running through it: Europe can step up, but the load is narrowing onto fewer shoulders over time.
So the influence contest isn’t mainly about changing minds on the fine print of Donbas geography. It’s about shaping what Western publics and leaders treat as the “reasonable” end state. Russia benefits if “reasonable” becomes synonymous with territorial concession and constrained Ukrainian sovereignty. Ukraine benefits if “reasonable” remains tied to credible security guarantees and the principle that aggression should not be rewarded.
This is why the question “who is winning?” has become less useful than it first appears. It pulls attention back to the map, when the map alone no longer explains where the war may be headed. The more relevant question is who is shaping the environment in which the war will eventually be settled. On that front, progress is measured not in kilometers, but in perception.
Wars of attrition end when one side breaks, when resources are exhausted, or when outside actors decide the cost of continuation outweighs the uncertainty of settlement. Ukraine’s survival depends on preventing that last calculation from turning against it. Russia’s strategy depends on nudging it in that direction without needing a decisive military breakthrough.
That is the other front in Ukraine. It does not produce dramatic footage. It does not appear on daily situation maps. But it may do more than the fighting itself to determine how the war ends.