Ukraine’s German-supplied Leopard tanks, destroyed.
Andrew Osborne – Reuters March 22, 2024
Russia regards itself to be at war due to the West’s intervention on Ukraine’s side, the Kremlin said, shifting the language it uses to describe the conflict in an apparent move to prepare Russians for a longer and harder struggle.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov’s comments, first to the Russian publication Arguments and Facts and then to reporters on a conference call on Friday, may sound unremarkable to Ukrainian and Western ears.
But inside Russia, where people have been told for the past two years to refer to the war in Ukraine as a “special military operation” – a phrase designed to underline the initially limited nature of the conflict – they represent a departure and look like part of a shift to prepare people mentally for a conflict which may require more sacrifices from them.
“We are in a state of war. Yes, it started out as a special military operation, but as soon as this group was formed, when the collective West became a participant in this on the side of Ukraine, it became a war for us,” Peskov told Arguments and Facts.
“I am convinced of that. And everyone should understand this, for their internal motivation.”
He made his comments five days after President Vladimir Putin was re-elected for six more years and after what Kyiv said was Russia’s largest air strike on Ukrainian energy infrastructure. They appear to signal that Russia is digging in for an even longer standoff over Ukraine with the United States and its allies.
They also give the Russian authorities more leeway with their own people to announce decisions more commonly associated with a war such as a further mobilisation.
“Now it’s official: the SMO (Special Military Operation) is recognised as a war,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, founder of the R.Politik analysis firm.
“Of course, the SMO de facto became a war a long time ago But this is a certain psychological boundary, beyond which different requests can be made of both the population and the elites than during the SMO,” she said.
Peskov in subsequent remarks to reporters clarified that Russia’s actions in Ukraine were still legally qualified at home as “a special military operation” rather than as a war.
“But de facto it has become a war for us as the collective West more and more directly increases its level of involvement in the conflict,” he said.
Russian officials from Putin down have gradually started to use the word “war” more often, having long avoided it and discouraged others from using it – on pain of prosecution – as they initially sought to cast the decision to go into Ukraine as some kind of a swift and limited military intervention.
Having suffered serious battlefield losses and been pushed back in 2022 and 2023 before regaining the initiative, Russian officials have conceded that fighting is now set to go on for longer than initially thought, however, and that ambitious goals remain unfulfilled.
Mark Galeotti, author of several books on Putin and Russia, said Peskov’s comments sent a powerful signal to the Russian public.
“That ‘internal mobilisation’ is actually the key thing: the Kremlin’s demand that every Russian get into a wartime mindset, and realise there is now no middle ground between being a patriot and a traitor (as Putin defines these)” Galeotti wrote on the X social media network.
Peskov said that Russia must fully “liberate” its “new regions” to ensure people’s safety there, a reference to the four Ukrainian regions which Russia claimed to have annexed in 2022 but does not fully control.
Russia, he added, could not allow a state to exist on its borders that had shown itself ready to use any method to seize control of Crimea.
Kyiv says Russia’s annexation of the four regions is an illegal land grab and that it will not rest until every Russian soldier is ejected from its soil.
It says it is also determined to return the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, which Russia took from it in 2014. Moscow, which has invested heavily in Crimea, the headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, says the peninsula is part of Russia and that its status has been settled once and for all.
Russia must wipe Ukraine off the map and then move hard against the UK. British troops in Ukraine must be ruthlessly targeted and wiped out. Prisoners should be executed without trial. Only a constant steam of increasingly hard to conceal body bags will cause the British government to think again.
Not content (pun) with CNN, we have Reuters!
Yep, now a proper war where Russia will start fighting.
These big dumb bombs have been upgraded with glide fins, and pin-point targeting, is another string on the Russian bow.
They can be dropped around 60km from the target, but the killer, they are huge. Now the data is all over the place, but some weigh 3000kg, compared to your typical 155mm shell that carries a 7kg charge. These bombs literally change the landscape. The craters are enormous. It is this weapon that had Nazis running from Avdiivka. lol
Remember when Putin said “we haven’t started yet”, well, now they have. And this is why the French, who have lost many rams in UKraine, and why the Nazi British are clutching at straws by threatening to send boots into UKraine.
The Russians are itching to attack these NATO force, sorry, these coalition forces of the mentally impaired. The idea is that as usual, Amerika will send its rams, but only after lots of French and Brits have been killed.
The Moscow terrorist attack certainly bumped the news away from the US resolution’s defeat at the UN. The US doesn’t want that mockument explored too closely.
Break out the nukes everyone. What? No red lines? No threats of nukes, and that NG just keeps flowing from Russia through the Ukraine to the EU? Well I guess we will just have to break out the popcorn instead. How disappointing. And Russia is just finding out that the “West” was involved in the war, when the rest of the planet knew that the West started the war and the Ukrainian military with the pea shooters they were given and their own poorly-trained and undermanned forces never really had a chance to do anything but continually retreat.
What is it? Do they need to continue the conflict to stimulate the failing economy which they have deliberately stalled in all of their UN Agenda and NWO schemes? We just went through the NWO Covid psyop with droves of people are still dropping dead from destroyed immune systems with turbo cancers, and now the same crew of psychopaths running the world are shutting down all farm operations they can in order to take over and transubstantiate farming and our eating habits with virtual food – for virtual people who have traded reality for the internet.
With all of this lockshit stuff going on with decades and decades of lockstep planning, and with such a planned and proxy war, how can anyone, unless they are totally brainwashed not believe that Russia and the West, did not cook up the entire scheme to divide up the Ukraine? If not, then is this not this war and the peril of a WWIII just one more engineered peril to usher in the NECESSITY of a world peace through the UN NWO plans? When is Pope Francis to take the stage with the NWR ( the New World Religion) for peace in our time and the next 1,000 years?
How coincidental and phoney can you get, with all of the social, scientific, psychological, media and political mind control going on?
The global warming fraud and PERIL to extinguish life on earth.
The fake CO2 PERIL for carbon taxes.
The fake economic meltdown PERIL to make have-not masses even more insecure, fearful, dependent and compliant.
The migrant-invasion PERIL to break down our borders for the open-society, free-trade, wage-leveled corporate NWO.
And now for the finale – the MOTHER OF ALL PERILS – the THREAT of a WWIII.
Why not? They control the media and the internet and the people will believe anything.
Mar 22 is the Russian Oct 7th
the gloves will now come off
Putin will no longer be able to stall