European Union law and challenges of cognitive warfare in context of mass migration

Abstract

The article emphasizes that the large-scale Russian aggression against Ukraine and the state of the Kremlin's "new cold war" against the civilized world is currently often perceived in terms of cognitive warfare concepts, with special challenges arising in the context of large-scale migration. At the same time, the issues of assessing the forms and methods of countering cognitive warfare in international and European law, including taking into account the migration factor, remain extremely understudied. The purpose of the article is to assess the legal regulation of cognitive warfare in European Union law in the context of large-scale migration. The paper analyzes and compares existing EU program documents, the features of the EU management model that has developed in this area, and the prospects for legal support for relevant activities at the level of European directives and regulations. The article proves that one of the first examples of regulatory regulation of cognitive warfare in European Union law should be considered the EU Action Plan on Strategic Communications. The next step in this dimension should be considered the Action Plan against Disinformation, announced in the European Union in December 2018. The authors state that the strategic communication task forces of the European External Action Service are now present in the Eastern Partnership and Central Asia countries, the Western Balkans, the Southern Neighborhood and sub-Saharan Africa. The study states a certain stagnation of the legal regulation of cognitive warfare in the regulatory framework of the European Union, with the preservation of a purely programmatic and legal approach to addressing this issue over the past decade, through the approval of profile Action Plans. The article proves that the relevant EU documents do not contain signs of either strategic planning or the principles of programmatic regulation, with the establishment of systems of measures and deadlines for their implementation. The key management body in this area has become the European External Action Service and specialized working groups established within its mandate, while the tasks and geographical dimension of these groups are directly relevant to the main regions of migratory pressure on the EU. The activities of the European Union in the organizational dimension are primarily reactive in nature, in the format of responding to key external information threats, the main of which is currently determined by Russian foreign activities within the framework of cognitive war against the civilized world. Under these conditions, the article proves that it is difficult to expect a strengthening of the regulatory support for relevant measures to counter Russian cognitive war to the level of special regulations and directives of the European Union. This is due to the specifics of the perception in EU law of the categories of the right to information and freedom of speech, which are perceived as fundamental and fundamental values of the Union. At the same time, the application of imperative, rather than programmatic models of countering cognitive war in the European Union occurs primarily in the sphere of sanctions policy, which should become the subject of separate scientific research.