Mindslaughter

The Kremlin's psychological games and the West's eagerness to play them

president.gov.ua

Françoise Thom is a historian, Sovietologist, and specialist in post-communist Russia. (She is also the daughter of the great mathematician Réné Thom.) She recently published a striking essay for Desk Russie titled The Second Front. Her thesis: Far from renouncing its plan to install a puppet government in Kyiv, Russia now seeks to achieve this goal by means of information and psychological warfare, aimed at ordinary Ukrainians and policymakers in Washington and Europe.

“We tend to forget,” she writes,