Since Russia began to invade Ukraine at the end of February of this year, the Kremlin strove to guard the speech. For the regime of Vladimir Putin It was not a question of a war or an aggression, but of a “special military operation”.
And Moscow remained firm until this Thursday the 22nd, or at least it seems so. Asked by the press, Putin declared: “Our goal is not to spin the wheel of military conflict any further. Unlike, end this war. It is what we aspire to and will aspire to”.
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According to “The vanguard”, the president was not referring to this year’s invasion, but “to the conflict of donbaswhich started in 2014″. However, the term did not sit well with other political authorities.
This Friday the 23rd, Nikita Yuferev -deputy for Saint Petersburg– requested that the Russian prosecutor’s office investigate and initiate a “criminal case against the president” for using that term. Yuferev also wrote to the Ministry of Interior.
The argument: “Several thousand people have already been sentenced for these words about the war.”.
What does the law say?
On March 4 of this year, the Lower House of the Russian Parliament (Duma) approved legislation that “imposes penalties of up to 15 years in prison for people who disseminate information they consider false about the country’s armed forces”.
It was a new action by the regime to silence opponentsin a nation where “the population it virtually only has access to official government-controlled channels, often leading the country’s citizens to believe that the Russian operation is small-scale or purely defensive.”.
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Some independent media and journalists, fearing harsh reprisals, began to turn off their antennas. Some of them They were the tv channel Dozhd (TV Rain) and the radio Ekho Moskvy.
CNN points out that the termspecial military operation” is vital to the message of the Kremlin. Thus masked “brutality” from his “campaign of ‘denazification'” and his supposedpatriotic and almost existential cause”.
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The opposition persecuted
Nikita Yuferev he is not a new player in Russian politics. The agency EFE remember that, in September, a “protocol” for asking the Duma to “accuse Putin of ‘high treason’ for starting a military campaign against the neighboring country”.
Unlike him, other dissidents did fall under the weight of the law.
At the beginning of this month, EFE notes, “The Russian court sentenced the man to eight and a half years in prison. opposition leader Ilya Yashin for denouncing the war crimes allegedly committed by the Russian Army in the north of Kiev”.
For now, it is clear that Russia’s war against Ukraine will continue..
This week the Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu y Vladimir Putin announced “a substantial investment in many areas of the military”. This will consist, says CNN, in “increasing the size of the military, accelerating weapons programs and deploying a new generation of hypersonic missiles to prepare Russia for what Putin called ‘unavoidable clashes’ with his adversaries”.