Vladimir Putin has attempted to justify Monday’s deadly missile strikes targeting cities in Ukraine as retaliation for its “terrorist action” against Russian territory.
The Russian president said the strikes were a response to an attack on the Kerch Bridge which links Russia to the annexed Crimean peninsula.
And he claimed Ukraine had also “tried to blow up” the TurkStream natural gas pipeline – notably switching from calling Ukrainians “terrorists” rather than “Nazis” as he has in the recent past.
Writing in The Guardian, chair of the steering committee of the Ukraine Forum at Chatham House, Simon Smith, said the newest label Mr Putin is using for Ukrainians signals “he is paying no heed to any waning commitment to the war among the population at large, following his mobilisation decision”.
He goes on to write it is “partly an internal message: to underline to his ‘party of war’ that he’s one of them, that he’s lost no time in launching an act of vengeance for this purported ‘terrorist’ outrage.”
Mr Smith writes that for those who have not condemned Russia’s attacks on Ukraine, “Putin’s hope is that those with no time to read beyond the ‘terrorist’ label will lazily reassure themselves that there are, after all, bad lots on both sides and that it’s okay to continue to sit on the fence”.
“Perhaps we’ll see the ‘terrorist’ label emerge as part of a new Putinist rhetorical strategy, to replace the ‘Nazi’ label he ludicrously attached to Ukraine’s administration in his ‘justification’ of the 2022 invasion.”
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Source: Skynews