Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the ”special military operation” had become “a real war” and blamed Western countries backing Ukraine for the supposed shift.
“There is a war going on, this is a real war. Do you know why it’s a war? Because it all started as a special military operation. It continues as a war because behind Kyiv stand Berlin, Paris, The Hague, Oslo, and, unfortunately, Washington,” Peskov said in an interview with VGTRK correspondent Pavel Zarubin (all quotes below are from the Russian news agency Interfax).
Western allies, Peskov said, are helping Ukraine “aim through their satellites, guide foreign weapons at our targets through all their infrastructure.”
That assistance, he argued, has not slowed the advance of Russian forces. Citing Russia’s battlefield gains, he repeated the claim that Kostiantynivka had come under Russian control — a claim Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has called a lie. Independent monitoring projects have not confirmed it either.
“No one should have any doubt that our military is steadily advancing and we are seeing concrete results,” Peskov said.
Peskov also addressed Ukrainian drone strikes against targets hundreds of kilometers from the Russian border, claiming Ukrainian forces were hitting energy and civilian infrastructure with no connection to the military-industrial complex. He called such strikes “an absolutely obvious terrorist act by the ‘Kyiv regime.’”
Since the start of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Russian authorities have insisted on referring to the war as a ”special military operation.” People who publicly called Russia’s war against Ukraine a war were prosecuted for spreading “fake news,” including Moscow municipal deputy Alexey Gorinov. In July 2022, Gorinov became the first person in Russia to receive a prison sentence under the law criminalizing “fake news” about the military.
In the years that followed, the Russian authorities made extensive use of both the “fake news” law and the law against “discrediting” the armed forces, handing down lengthy prison sentences.