Putin for the first time calls the <x0V war” conflict in Ukraine

Russian President Vladimir Putin, on Thursday used the word <x0 war> to refer to the conflict in Ukraine, for the first time publicly diverting from his carefully drawn description about Moscow's invasion as a special military “option” 10 months after it began, writes CNN.

“Our goal is not to blow the wheel of military conflict, but, rather, to end it War. We've been trying to do this and we're going to keep going.“, Putin told reporters in Moscow after attending a meeting of the State Council on Youth Policy.

Putin's critics say that using the word “to fight “to describe the Ukrainian conflict has been effectively illegal in Russia since March, when the Russian leader signed a censorship law that makes it a crime to spread false “ ” about the invasion, with a prison sentence of up to 15 years for anyone convicted.

So now the use of the word <x0W of war” from Putin did not go unnoticed.

Nikita Yuferev, a municipal lawmaker from St Petersburg who left Russia because of his stand against the war, said on Thursday he had asked Russian authorities to prosecute Putin for “spreading false information to the army”.

There was no decree to end the special military operation, no war was declared. Several thousand people have already been convicted for such words about war”, Yuferev wrote on Twitter.

An American official told CNN that their initial assessment was that Putin's expression was not deliberate and likely a linguistic pencil. However, officials will be watching closely to see what the figures within the Kremlin say about this in the coming days.

Thousands of people have been killed, entire villages have disappeared and billions of dollars of infrastructure has been destroyed since Putin's conquest in Ukraine on 24 February.

That day, Putin used the term <x0 special military operation” to describe his attack. He has described continued brutality as a “denification campaign” a description rejected by historians and political observers, and has increasingly described Russia's unprotested conquest as a patriotic and almost existential cause.