For more than 15 months, Russia has been waging a war in Ukraine that the Kremlin has refused to call a war, but the situation is changing: President Vladimir Putin is using the word “war” more and more often, according to a Reuters analysis. from News.ro.

When Putin sent troops into Ukraine on February 24 last year, he called the move a “special military operation” — a euphemism the Kremlin, Russian ministers and state media largely respected, even coining a new Russian acronym, SVO.

Calling the conflict a “war” was effectively banned by the Russian media in a series of laws shortly after the invasion. The Russian press was ordered not to use the word war – and either complied or was closed.

But in response to what Russia called a major Ukrainian drone attack on Moscow, Putin last week used the word “war” — four times — in reference to Ukraine, according to a transcript of his comments posted on the Kremlin’s website.

“No matter what we say, they will always try to blame Russia, but this is not correct: we did not start this war, I repeat. In 2014, the Kyiv regime started a war in Donbas,” Putin said. This remark was made on Sunday in the most important segment of the audience on the state television “Russia”. Kremlin correspondent Pavlo Zarubin told the audience that Putin devoted a lot of time to the conflict behind the scenes.

On May 9, on Victory Day, when Russians commemorate the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II, Putin told veterans in Red Square: “A real war has again been unleashed against our Motherland.”

In recent months, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, Kremlin spokesman Dmytro Peskov, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, and the leader of Wagner’s mercenaries Yevgeny Prigozhin have publicly used the word war (“war” in Russian).

“We are practically living in a state of war,” said Vyacheslav Gladkov, the governor of Russia’s Belgorod region, which has come under attack in recent weeks.

However, the Russian elite has been secretly calling the “special forces operation” in Ukraine a war for a long time.

The gradual recognition of the war – even publicly – shows how the Kremlin’s perception has changed and could provide a different picture of the future after more than 15 months of war, which is considered the bloodiest in Europe since World War II. further.

“It’s amazing how Putin and the elite seem to be breaking their own rules,” said a Western diplomat in Moscow. “The most important thing is what it says about the future: does war mean a more serious approach and what will Russia look like in war?” he asks.

Euphemisms of war, an ancient practice

War euphemisms are nothing new. US President Lyndon B. Johnson presented the growing involvement in the Vietnam War as “limited military action”, while the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was presented by US President George W. Bush as “Operation Enduring Freedom”.

When Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev launched the 10-year Soviet-Afghan war in 1979, Moscow presented the invasion as an operation to “provide international aid to the friendly Afghan people.”

“We need to remember and know that SVO was invented at a time when they thought they would win quickly and without bloodshed, as in Crimea,” says Abbas Gallyamov, a former editor of the Kremlin language. “But now everyone understands that this is a war. And this became clear a long time ago, when everyone realized that the blitzkrieg had failed,” he says.

Kremlin transcripts show that Putin has repeatedly used the word recently, both in connection with what he says is an information and sanctions “war” launched by the West against Russia, and accusing Ukraine of escalating the conflict.

Instead, he used the term sparingly last year. In September, when he claimed that four Ukrainian regions were part of Russia, he called the conflict a war, in October he said the West was “inciting war”, and in December he was even more blunt, talking about “this war”.

Is Russia going to war?

This prompted St. Petersburg councilor Nikita Yuferev to file a complaint. The efforts have come to nothing, Yuferev said, and complaints about the use of the word by other officials have yielded no response.

“Sooner or later we will come to the point where everyone will call it a war and recognize it as a war,” Yuferev told Reuters. “And war can mean martial law, mobilization of the economy, mobilization of the army and reservists,” he emphasized.

The Kremlin said that they do not plan to introduce martial law or new mobilization after last year’s limited one. But last month, Putin approved amendments to allow elections to be held under martial law, and defense companies brought in extra shifts to work almost 24 hours a day.

The attacks on Russian territory, which Moscow has blamed on Ukraine, have strengthened opinion inside the Kremlin, strengthening the position of radicals who favor a much tougher approach to a war that Putin says Russia has not yet reached a serious level.

In Moscow, the war is presented as existential and decorated with the symbolism of Russian Orthodoxy.

The head of Wagner’s mercenaries, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who blames Putin’s command for the defeat of the Russian army, reminded of the prospect of the development of events, as during the dictatorship of Chilean General Augusto Pinochet. “People write to me that we have to create Chile to defend ourselves: Chile means Pinochet; Chile means the Russian elite – or especially the bureaucratic elite – in a stadium, surrounded by people with assault rifles,” Prigozhin said.

“This is not a game,” he said. “We will lose this war,” Prigozhin warned.

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