A St Petersburg politician has asked prosecutors to investigate Russian President Vladimir Putin for using the word “war” to describe the conflict in Ukraine, accusing the Kremlin chief of violating his own law.
For months, Putin described the invasion as a “special military operation”. He signed laws in March that prescribe hefty fines and prison sentences for discrediting or spreading “deliberately false information” about the armed forces, putting people at risk of prosecution if they call the war by its name.
But he departed from his usual language on Thursday when he told reporters: “Our aim is not to turn the wheel of military conflict, but rather to end this war.”
Nikita Yuferev, an opposition adviser in the city where Putin was born, said he knew his legal challenge would go nowhere, but had brought it forward to expose the “falsehood” of the system.
“It is important for me to do this to draw attention to the contradiction and injustice of these laws that he [Putin] adopts and signs, but which he himself does not observe,” he told Reuters news agency.
“I think the more we talk about it, the more people will doubt his honesty, his infallibility, and the less support he will have.”
In his response, filed in an open letter, Yuferev called on the attorney general and interior minister to “hold Putin accountable before the law for spreading false news about the actions of the Russian army”.
Yuferev said Putin’s critics who publicly called the war a war had been severely punished.
Opposition politician Ilya Yashin was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison this month for spreading “false information” about the army. In July, another councilor, Alexei Gorinov, was sentenced to seven years for criticizing the invasion.
Yuferev said he had previously drawn authorities’ attention to the use of the word war by other prominent figures, including Sergei Kiriyenko, deputy head of the presidential administration, and top lawmaker Sergei Mironov.
He stated that the police told him that they looked into the complaint against Kiriyenko and found that he had done nothing wrong and refused to investigate Mironov’s case.
After publishing the open letter about Putin, Yuferev said he had received hundreds of hate mail. But he said he believed most Russians understood what was really going on in Ukraine.
“War, in Russian society, is a scary word. Everyone is raised by grandparents who lived through World War II, everyone remembers the saying ‘anything but war,'” he said.
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