TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Experts from Ukraine’s defense, anti-corruption, and civil society sectors joined Taiwanese researchers in Taipei on Tuesday to discuss how Russia and China deploy cognitive warfare to weaken democracies, highlighting parallels between the two authoritarian states’ influence operations.
The forum, organized by Taiwan’s Doublethink Lab, brought a Ukrainian delegation to Taipei as part of a wider East Asia trip to share lessons learned from nearly a decade of Russian aggression and four years of full-scale war.
Doublethink Lab CEO and founder Wu Min-hsuan (吳銘軒) opened the event by noting that “from day one of the invasion, China amplified almost identical narratives to justify Russia’s attack on Ukraine.” Wu said his visits to Kyiv revealed “striking similarities” between Chinese and Russian disinformation strategies and stressed the importance of deeper Taiwan-Ukraine cooperation on information defense.
Russia weaponizes every part of life
The first presenter was Viktoriia Vyshnivska, senior researcher at Ukraine’s Independent Anti-Corruption Commission (NAKO). Vyshnivska is known internationally for her work tracing Western microelectronics illicitly routed to Russia and North Korea for use in missiles, drones, and other weapons.
Vyshnivska said the forum emerged from Doublethink Lab’s visit to Kyiv last year, where both sides agreed that Taiwan could benefit from Ukraine’s real-time experience resisting authoritarian influence and cognitive warfare.
In her presentation, Vyshnivska outlined how Russia “weaponizes almost every single part of your life,” from energy, trade, and agriculture to culture, religion, education, and social media.
She described how long-running Russian gas disinformation campaigns helped set conditions for the 2014 annexation of Crimea, and how similar narratives were used to foment separatism in Donbas. Moscow’s influence operations, she said, are often supported by real-world sabotage designed to create the very failures Russia later cites as proof that Ukraine is a failed state.
Vyshnivska also detailed Russia’s use of films, historical revisionism, and the Russian Orthodox Church to push narratives denying Ukrainian identity, as well as the deployment of AI-generated videos showing fabricated Ukrainian soldiers begging for the war to end.
“Sometimes it sounds absurd, like you’re living inside a conspiracy theory,” she said. “But Russia understands exactly what it’s doing, and it targets audiences everywhere — inside Ukraine, across Europe, and globally.”
Parallels with China
Responding to questions, Vyshnivska said Russian and Chinese cognitive warfare share core themes: warning that “the West will abandon you,” amplifying fears about mobilization, and portraying governments as corrupt or incompetent.
She said she rarely encounters people abroad who question Taiwan’s existence, unlike Ukraine, which for years was unfamiliar to many and often perceived as part of Russia. “Unfortunately, that made Russia’s narrative that ‘Ukraine is an artificial state’ more successful,” she said.
One participant asked when democracies should consider imposing limits on speech or influence channels to protect national security.
Vyshnivska said no universal formula exists, and each democracy must balance freedoms with real threats. “The red line should be whether a restriction protects citizens more than it harms them,” she said, citing Ukraine’s ban on Russian Orthodox Church institutions with proven ties to Russian intelligence. “Citizens themselves must decide, not the government alone.”
Another audience member asked which Russian tactic is most effective. Vyshnivska pointed to operations targeting Ukraine’s economy and defense industry, saying Russia combines sabotage with propaganda to reinforce the message that Ukraine cannot sustain itself.
“The most challenging part is countering a narrative when people feel it’s partly true,” she said. “Convincing Ukrainians that things are not as bad as Russian propaganda claims is difficult when sabotage has created real damage.”
Despite this, she emphasized that Ukraine’s resilience demonstrates that authoritarian predictions of collapse have repeatedly failed. “Russia wants you to believe everything is lost,” she said. “We are proof that it is not.”
