On 19 June 2025 Putin answered a journalist's question about Russia's massive attack on Kyiv on 17 June 2025 using a truly twisted logic. The journalist said that his colleagues present in Kyiv saw the Russian rockets hitting civilian houses with their own eyes, to which Putin replied that if Russian rockets indeed hit civilian quarters, the journalists would be dead and unable to see anything. Therefore, he continued, it was obvious that the journalists watched Russian rockets hitting exclusively military targets. We have previously published compilation of videos from that night showing how the attacks looked like and what were their consequences but Putin's outright lies aren't really surprising. He's not a politician nor military, he's a KGB operative who had been trained to lie on spot without blinking his eye. He may be not very good at managing a country or strategic planning, but disinformation is the only job that he's actually good at.

Russian society has accepted it and normalised such response for itself too - in such a discussion a typical Putinist will pass several stages of denial - firstly, deny that it happened. If you show videos, claim it was staged, AI-generated etc. If you show enough evidence it was authentic, they will simply say "okay maybe, but they deserved it". Putin knows very well about the scale of civilian casualties Russian attacks are inflicting on Ukraine, but for him the terror is a natural part of "convincing" (bullying) Ukrainian civilians to approve surrender. Following this logic, Russia will only increase terror on civilian population the further Ukraine is from surrender, and this campaign may continue for years even if front-line fighting is stopped, because apart from aerial bombing Russia has literally zero other leverages on Ukraine.