By Marianna Prysiazhniuk
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Imagine two chess grandmasters at a table. One is secretly playing go, not chess. Their moves seem inexplicable by chess logic until you realise one never aimed to checkmate. Instead, their goal was to encircle, build territory, and make the entire board unplayable. This is the predicament of Western liberal democracies in the face of Russian information warfare. At stake is something deeper than narratives: a collision between two incompatible epistemologies. These are two fundamentally different answers to the question of what truth is and what it is for.
Architectures of Truth
The phrase Sapere aude! (“Dare to know!”) was first used by Immanuel Kant in his 1784 essay “What is Enlightenment?” For us, it’s more than a philosophical motto – it’s foundational to Western liberal civilisation. The Enlightenment claimed that truth is objective, accessible to all by reason, empirically verifiable, and transformative. Our institutions – universities, courts, free press – were built to sustain this value. Our democracy depends on informed citizens, open debate, and facts for sound collective decision-making (Mill).
This epistemology has a structural blind spot: it assumes good faith. It assumes all who join public discourse are committed to reality. Hannah Arendt warned that traditional safeguards – public opinion, press scrutiny – “lose their force when the liar has achieved the position where he decides what the facts are”.
When one party treats discourse as pure strategy, untethered from truth, the Enlightenment framework does not just struggle; it short-circuits. Modern science adds to this: Popper’s falsifiability, peer review, and investigative journalism all rely on the belief that truth advances through adversarial testing. There is an assumption that interlocutors value truth over victory, but not all do.
Against Kant’s Sapere Aude stands Sofia (Σοφία). This is not knowledge (знание) but wisdom (премудрость); not facts, but truth-as-living-reality (истина). It is accessed not through cold logic but through spiritual intuition, community, and participation in a transcendent order that exceeds simple propositions (Florensky, Lossky).
This is not anti-intellectualism. It is a different intellectual system. Nineteenth-century Russian thinkers like Ivan Kireyevsky, Alexei Khomyakov, and Vladimir Solovyov offered a sharp critique. Western philosophy, they said, fragmented truth into “separate faculties — reason, will, feeling, faith, imagination,” losing what Kireyevsky called “the inner core of spiritual life”.
Where the West separates and checks facts, the Russian Orthodox tradition integrates and testifies. Truth is not shown; it is witnessed. Solovyov proposed “integral knowledge” (цельное знание) as the reunification of what Western modernity had split: empirical science, rational philosophy, and mystical theology. He argued that positivism without spiritual roots produces “science without soul”.
Pavel Florensky, a mathematician, Orthodox priest, and philosopher, took this further. His magnum opus argues that ultimate truths are antinomies: contradictions that still both hold. “Truth is a living, synthetic unity of contradictions”. This is not a logical flaw but a theological point. Reason is necessary but not enough; at the highest levels, truth needs a leap beyond simple reasoning.
There are real geopolitical consequences. An actor in this epistemological tradition relates to truth differently. For them, coherence, intuition, and ideological wholeness outweigh verifying correspondence.
How Sofia has been weaponised
The leap from Florensky’s theology to Putin’s information doctrine is not direct, but it can be traced. Eurasianist intellectuals like Trubetskoy, Savitsky, and Gumilev turned Orthodox epistemology into a civilizational doctrine. They positioned Russia as a distinct civilisation with its own epistemic criteria, opposed to Western rationalist universalism (Laruelle, Bassin). Now, truth is civilizationally relative but internally absolute. Each civilisation judges reality on its own standards.
For them, no universal standards exist, only imperial impositions.
Aleksandr Dugin, sometimes called Putin’s ideological architect, made the stakes plain. Information warfare is a metaphysical conflict. The West’s insistence on verifiable facts is not neutral; it is a civilizational tool to resist. His “Fourth Political Theory” combines Eurasianism, Heidegger’s ontology, and Traditionalism to cast Russia as the champion of anti-liberal modernity.
This doctrine rejects Western policies as well as Western truth and ontology.
“The end of history will not be the universalisation of liberal democracy, but the awakening of different civilisations asserting their own truths,” Aleksandr Dugin, cited in American Reformer, 2025
Vladislav Surkov (2019), who was First Deputy Head of the Putin Administration and a top adviser, brought this into governance. He called it “sovereign democracy”: democratic in form, hierarchical in substance, in which truth serves sovereign power rather than universal criteria. Putin uses this language with care. His 2007 Munich speech (Putin, 2007), his 2021 essay on Ukraine (Putin, 2021), and his talk of “traditional values” and Orthodoxy are not just propaganda. They are the voice of a consistent — if deeply authoritarian — epistemological worldview.
“It was the first non-linear war… Now four coalitions collided. Not two against two, or three against one. All against all,” Vladislav Surkov (writing as Natan Dubovitsky) Short story ‘Without Sky,’ published days before the annexation of Crimea, February 2014.
How the gap works
Exploit one – is volume. Russian information operations do not assert counter-truths. Instead, they flood the environment with contradictory noise. The RAND Corporation’s analysis (Paul & Matthews) found a key tactic: high-volume, multi-channel, rapid, and constant dissemination, regardless of accuracy. This turns every Enlightenment idea upside down. Truth is drowned, not scarce; lies are shameless, not costly. Correction is futile, not restorative.
“The constant provision of absurd, conflicting explanations and ridiculous lies — the famous ‘firehose of falsehoods’ — encourages many people to believe that there is no truth at all. The result is widespread cynicism. If you don’t know what’s true, you’re not likely to join a great movement for democracy,” Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic writer, Pulitzer Prize winner.
Pomerantsev documented Russian state media’s sophisticated nihilism with the MH17 case. Russian media, despite all facts and control over part of Eastern Ukraine, blamed Ukraine, the CIA, or some third party. They advanced all theories at once, never retracting disproven ones. The goal was not persuasion but cognitive exhaustion. When audiences cannot judge truth, they withdraw into tribal epistemic bubbles (Sunstein). Kahneman’s (2011) cognitive work explains how sheer volume can overwhelm deliberation, and repetition, even of falsehood, can raise perceived plausibility (Pennycook et al., 2018).
Exploit two relates to “reflexive control,” created by Soviet cyberneticist Vladimir Lefebvre, who saw it as a way to shape an enemy’s decisions so they “voluntarily” choose in your favour, without direct force. Unlike plain propaganda, reflexive control respects the adversary’s agency; it shapes the information environment so that rational decisions support your aims.
Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 is the classic example (Giles). “Little green men” – soldiers without insignia – sowed ambiguity. This paralysed NATO’s threat assessment. Russia achieved its goal before the West finished debating. Framing it as “protecting Russian-speakers from a fascist coup” gave both domestic justification and international cover. Each step targeted Western assumptions: trust in good faith, need for verified facts, and demand for narrative plausibility before collective action.
Exploit three links to how Western democracies prize transparency: freedom of speech, open debate, and a free press. These are not add-ons; they are essential to Enlightenment epistemology. Yet in adversarial settings, they become attack surfaces. Lucas and Pomerantsev showed Russia’s disinformation apparatus thrives on Western openness. Social media spreads messages, debate grants false legitimacy, and investigative journalism can amplify fake narratives. Meanwhile, Russian society is sealed off, creating stark asymmetry.
The structure remains perfectly asymmetric: Russia exploits openness while practising opacity. Western free-speech protections shield the dissemination of disinformation (Bollinger & Stone). Open debate provides the “both-sides” legitimacy platform (Boykoff & Boykoff). The very transparency that sustains democratic trust becomes the infrastructure of democratic sabotage.
“If you want to rip the heart out of a democracy – go after facts. Step one: You lie to yourself all the time. Step two: You say it’s your opponents who lie. Step three: everyone looks around and says ‘What is truth? There is no truth.’ And then resistance is impossible, and the game’s over,” Timothy Snyder, Yale University historian, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, January 10, 2021.
The Courage to Know what you’re fighting
Kant’s Sapere aude – dare to know – was always a call to intellectual courage, not merely intellectual capacity. In the current information environment, that courage must extend to knowing your own epistemological assumptions, knowing their structural vulnerabilities, and knowing that the adversary you face does not share them and does not intend to.
Western democracies are not losing the information war because their content is less sophisticated. They are losing ground because they continue to play chess while their adversary plays go, and interpreting every incomprehensible move as a “lie” rather than recognising it as a move in a fundamentally different game.
Understanding that game – philosophically, operationally, and strategically – is the prerequisite for building defences that actually function. The epistemic gap between Sapere Aude and Sofia is not merely an academic curiosity. It is a geopolitical fault line, and information operations happen along it every day.
“Just shouting about ‘facts’ will get you nowhere with those who no longer trust the sources that produce the,” Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic writer, Pulitzer Prize winner.
References
Arendt, H. (1967). Truth and politics. The New Yorker, February 25, 1967.
Bassin, M. (2016). The Gumilev mystique: Biopolitics, Eurasianism, and the construction of community in modern Russia. Cornell University Press.
Bollinger, L. C., & Stone, G. R. (Eds.). (2018). The free speech century. Oxford University Press.
Boykoff, M. T., & Boykoff, J. M. (2004). Balance as bias: Global warming and the US prestige press. Global Environmental Change, 14(2), 125–136. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2003.10.001
Dugin, A. (2012). The fourth political theory (M. Millerman, Trans.). Arktos Media.
Florensky, P. (1997). The pillar and ground of the truth: An essay in Orthodox theodicy in twelve letters (B. Jakim, Trans.). Princeton University Press. (Original work published in 1914).
Giles, K. (2016). Handbook of Russian information warfare. NATO Defense College.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Kant, I. (1996). An answer to the question: What is enlightenment? In J. Schmidt (Ed.), What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-century answers and twentieth-century questions (pp. 17–22). University of California Press. (Original work published 1784).
Kireyevsky, I. V. (1998). On the nature of European culture and on its relation to Russian culture. In A. Gleason (Ed.), European and Muscovite: Ivan Kireevsky and the origins of Slavophilism (pp. 211–265). Harvard University Press. (Original work published 1852).
Lefebvre, V. A. (1984). Reflexive control: The Soviet concept of influencing an adversary’s decision making process. Science Applications International Corporation.
Laruelle, M. (2008). Russian Eurasianism: An ideology of empire. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Lossky, V. (1957). The mystical theology of the Eastern Church. James Clarke & Co.
Lucas, E., & Pomerantsev, P. (2016). Winning the information war: Techniques and counter-strategies to Russian propaganda in Central and Eastern Europe. Center for European Policy Analysis.
Mill, J. S. (1974). On Liberty. Penguin Books. (Original work published 1859).
Popper, K. R. (2002). The logic of scientific discovery. Routledge. (Original work published 1959).
Paul, C., & Matthews, M. (2016). The Russian “firehose of falsehood” propaganda model: Why it might work and options to counter it. RAND Corporation. https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html
Putin, V. (2007, February 10). Speech at the 43rd Munich Conference on Security Policy. President of Russia. http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/24034
Putin, V. (2021, July 12). On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians. President of Russia. http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181
Sunstein, C. R. (2017). #Republic: Divided democracy in the age of social media. Princeton University Press.
Solovyov, V. S. (1996). Lectures on divine humanity (P. Zouboff, Trans.). Lindisfarne Books. (Original work published 1874).
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Posted by: Nayara Güércio (Trilateral Research)