For more than 15 months, Russia has been waging a war in Ukraine that the Kremlin has refused to call a war — but that’s changing: the president Vladimir Putin now uses the word more and more often “war”.

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

Describing the conflict as a “war” was effectively illegal for the Russian media under a series of laws adopted shortly after the invasion. The Russian media were ordered not to use the word war – and they either complied or shut down.

But in response to what Russia said was a major Ukrainian drone strike against Moscow, Putin last week used the word “war” four times in reference to Ukraine, according to his remarks as these were transmitted by the Kremlin.

“No matter what we say, they will always try to put the blame on Russia, but this is not correct: we did not launch this war, I repeat, in 2014 the Kiev regime launched a war in Donbas,” Putin said.

This comment was carried by the main Sunday news program of the state-run Rossiya television station. His Kremlin correspondent Pavel Zarubin told viewers that Putin was spending a lot of time behind the scenes on the conflict.

The conflict in eastern Ukraine began in 2014 after the then pro-Russian president was ousted by Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution and Russia annexed Crimea, with Moscow-backed separatist forces fighting Ukraine’s armed forces.

On Victory Day on May 9, when Russians commemorate the Soviet Union’s victory over 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 Dmitry Peskov, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and the head of Wagner’s mercenaries Yevgeny Prigozhin have all publicly used the word war – “boina” in Russian.

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

In their private conversations, the Russian elite talk about war.

“It’s striking how much Putin and the elite seem to be breaking their own rules,” says a Western diplomat in Moscow.

“More importantly, what does this say about the future: does war mean a more serious approach, and what would a Russia at war look like?”

In Moscow, the war is characterized as existential and adorned with Russian Orthodox symbolism.

The head of the Russian mercenaries Prigozhin, who accuses the leadership of the armed forces of destroying the Russian army, raised the issue of things developing as they had in Chile under the rule of General Augusto Pinochet.

“People write to me that we need to make a Chile to defend ourselves: Chile – that is Pinochet; Chile is Russia’s elite – or above all the bureaucratic elite – in a stadium surrounded by people with automatic weapons”, Prigozhin said.

“It’s not a game”he added. “We are losing this war.”