Kosovo’s Cognitive Blindspot

How Serbia and Russia Wage a Psychological War on the Republic, and Why Prishtina Must Respond Now.

Jun 13, 2025

∙ Paid

The Acting PM’s triumphant security declaration, and the war it failed to name.

On 9 June 2025, Kosovo’s Acting Prime Minister, Albin Kurti, published an upbeat post on Facebook1.

It was an official declaration of progress, addressed to the citizens of a young republic still besieged by hostile forces on its borders and in its discourse.

Titled “National Security Intelligence in Kosovo”, the statement meticulously catalogued tactical gains: the dismantling of illegal Serbian-backed structures in the North; the neutralisation of extremist paramilitaries; the confiscation of weapons; the severing of trafficking routes; the arrest of Serbian intelligence operatives; even a shift in Serbian electoral influence, with a marked decline in the once-dominant "Serbian List2."

The tone was sober, triumphant, an account of real work done, risks taken, and battles won.

And yet, as I read the post, as a journalist who has spent years reporting on Serbia’s hybrid warfare in Kosovo, and on the Russian doctrine behind it, I felt an overwhelming sense of dread.

Not for what the statement said.
But for what it conspicuously omitted.

In the age of reflexive control, a Russian-born strategy of psychological warfare perfected in Moscow and exported to its Balkan clients, no amount of physical security can suffice to safeguard a state whose collective mind is being manipulated.

And Kosovo, today, is under precisely such an assault.

For the war now being waged against this republic is not fought only with guns or trafficked explosives, though those threats remain lethal. It is fought with stories. With false narratives. With the corrosion of civic trust.

With the weaponisation of despair.

With the systematic disorientation of Kosovo’s citizens, and its allies abroad about the very legitimacy of their republic.

This war, Serbia is waging with relentless purpose. Russia, through its proxies, is waging with ruthless sophistication. And Kosovo’s government, despite its physical security successes, is not yet fighting it.

That is why this piece must be written.

That is why this warning must be sounded, now.

II. THE WAR KOSOVO IS NOT FIGHTING

Reflexive Control: Serbia’s Cognitive Offensive Against Kosovo

In Russian military doctrine, there exists a concept known as reflexive control3, a method of influencing an adversary's perception so thoroughly that they act in ways counter to their own interests. It is a strategy of cognitive subversion: not to persuade, but to corrode; not to argue, but to disorient. Truth becomes elusive, trust collapses, and democratic institutions lose their moral clarity.

This doctrine is no longer theoretical for Kosovo. Serbia, with ideological and technical backing from Russia, has operationalised reflexive control in its campaign against Kosovo’s sovereignty. Unable to win on the battlefield, Serbia has shifted its offensive to the informational domain, attacking the very foundations of Kosovo’s statehood: truth, memory, and legitimacy.

This is the war Kosovo’s acting Prime Minister did not name in his celebratory post following the foiled paramilitary attack in Banjska (September 2023)4. It is not a kinetic war of weapons, but a psychological war, waged through distortion, defamation, and disinformation, in which Kosovo’s greatest vulnerabilities are not tanks at the border but microphones in studios and posts on screens.

Case in Point: The Revisionist Echo Chamber

On a spring morning, amidst Russian missile strikes in Ukraine, a chilling echo of Serbian wartime propaganda surfaced, not in Belgrade, but in Prishtina. Kosovar journalist Ilir Mirena, editor of Periskopi, publicly claimed that the Kosovo Liberation Army “provoked” Serbia into committing massacres so that NATO would intervene5. This is not analysis. It is revisionism, echoing the precise narrative once peddled by Slobodan Milosevic’s regime to justify genocide. It is reflexive control in action, eroding the very moral basis on which Kosovo’s freedom was achieved.

Valon Syla, another figure amplifying these views, frequently deploys rhetorical strategies aimed not at informing but at exhausting public reason. Their narratives sow confusion about Kosovo’s past and question its legitimacy as a state. Reports from Slobodna Bosna have even linked Mirena’s platform to Serbian state-aligned funding channels6, further underscoring the strategic coordination behind these distortions.

Smearing Memory as Subversion

The recent smear campaign against genocide survivor and Deputy Speaker Saranda Bogujevci is another direct manifestation of this cognitive war7. When Mirena cynically weaponised a photograph from a solemn commemoration of the Bogujevci family massacre, stripping it of context to attack Prime Minister Kurti, he ignited a chain of coordinated attacks. What followed was a parade of journalistic malpractice and misogyny, led by Lirim Mehmetaj, Berat Buzhala, and Milaim Zeka, individuals whose records show systematic ethical breaches and ties to political mafias and Belgrade-aligned operatives.

This was not free speech, it was psychological warfare. It was not opinion, it was cognitive sabotage, aimed at rewriting history, defaming survivors, and fracturing the social unity necessary for a sovereign democracy.

Exposing the State’s Spine

Further still, the calculated efforts of Berat Buzhala to ridicule and expose the Prime Minister’s security detail, despite known assassination attempts against Kurti8, are not mere satire. They are operational disclosures that endanger lives and compromise state integrity. By publishing images of security protocols and personnel9, Buzhala turned protection into spectacle, and security into farce. This aligns precisely with Russian-style disinformation tactics: delegitimise the state by mocking its right to self-defence, while exposing vulnerabilities for malicious actors to exploit.

A Battle Not Just of Narratives, But of Sovereignty

The ultimate goal of these campaigns is clear: to delegitimise Kosovo’s statehood, weaken public trust, and condition the international community to abandon the Republic as a “failed state.” This war is not theoretical, it is being waged in the language of ridicule, the syntax of social media, and the silence of complicit institutions like the Kosovo Journalists Association — AGK, whose inaction in the face of such abuse reveals a deeper crisis in Kosovo’s civic spine.

As Anne Applebaum and Igor Yakovenko have argued, this is not propaganda meant to convince. It is propaganda meant to exhaust, to make truth so brittle and contested that nothing solid remains for citizens to defend.

The Line Must Be Drawn

The articles cited above are not isolated incidents; they are part of a playbook, meticulously deployed to dismantle Kosovo from the inside. In this new kind of war, journalistic ethics are the front lines, and public memory is the terrain.

Kosovo must recognise these incursions for what they are: not politics, not debate, but information warfare. The Republic was founded upon the memory of sacrifice, the clarity of justice, and the courage of survivors like Saranda Bogujevci. To allow this new war to go unnamed, unchallenged, is to abandon the very ideals upon which the state stands.

The choice is stark: resist the corrosion of truth, or be defeated by it.
This is the war Kosovo is not fighting. And it must start now.

Keep reading with a 7-day free trial

Subscribe to Gunpowder Chronicles to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.