The Kremlin had so far persisted in designating the conflict as a “special military operation” and had banned the use of the words “invasion” and “war”.
Is this a clumsiness or a real reversal in the Kremlin’s communication? At the end of a meeting of the Council of State in Moscow on Thursday December 22, Vladimir Putin used for the first time the term “guerreto refer to the conflict in Ukraine.
«Our goal is not to spin the conflict like a flywheel, but, on the contrary, to end this war and we aspire to that.“, declared the Russian head of state in front of an audience of journalists. Since February 24, 2022, the first day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russia has officially referred to the invasion as “special military operation».
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A week later, on March 4, the deputies adopted in the Duma a text punishing with prison the “misleading informationon the army. Since then, Russian and international journalists who do not take up official dispatches have been considered as senders of “Fake News“. But the amendment does not only apply to information professionals, but to all citizens present in Russia. And it provides for various prison terms of up to 15 years.
The Russian authorities have therefore enshrined in law the banning of the use of words like “guerre» et «invasion“, according to the critics of the policy of the regime. A Saint Petersburg city councilor, Nikita Yuferev, who fled Russia because of his opposition to the war, tweeted that he had alerted the judicial authorities to prosecute the Russian president. “Several thousand people have already been sentenced for such remarks on the war“, he adds.
In July, Moscow city councilor Alexei Gorinov “was sentenced to 7 yearsfor calling the war a war at a meeting of the Council of Deputies“, also declared on the social network a close friend of the Russian opponent Alexeï Navalny. Alexei Gorinov was arrested in April for having denounced on March 15 the “assault“of Moscow against Ukraine where now”children die every day“, during a meeting of its municipal assembly of district, session filmed and broadcast on YouTube. “All efforts of civil society must be used to end the war and lead to the withdrawal of Russian forces from Ukrainian territory“, he had declared in particular.
One slip?
L’«special operation” of limited scope aims in the official jargon to “protect” the Russian-speaking populations of Ukraine from one “genocide”. And Putin recalled it again in his remarks yesterday. “The main objective of Russia is to protect the Ukrainian people“, did he declare. Accusing the United States of pitting the Ukrainian and Russian peoples against each other, Putin reiterated that Russia would continue its efforts to “Russian people unite». “The roots between the peoples of Russia and Ukraine are stronger than those who try to divide us”he hammered again.
According to the Russian news agency Tass, the head of the Kremlin also affirmed that Russia was ready to discuss with Kyiv to find a diplomatic solution to the conflict: “All armed conflicts end with talks. The sooner kyiv understands this, the better.”.
If Putin therefore used the term “guerrethe general rhetoric therefore remains the same. Asked by CNN, an American official on condition of anonymity specifies that this first use of the word is undoubtedly not intentional, and would be more, according to him, a slip.
At the beginning of November, the American Chief of Staff, General Mark Milley estimated that more than 100,000 Russian soldiers had been killed or injured since the start of the invasion of Ukraine. The losses on the Ukrainian side are probably of the same order, added the American soldier.