Dmitry Peskov’s grotesque admission that Russia is “ready to discuss stopping strikes on civilian targets” if only “one legal obstacle” didn’t stand in the way is not just a rhetorical stumble. It is a confession masked in bureaucratic smog. After years of denials, finger-pointing, and crocodile-slick spin, this statement rips away the last shreds of the Kremlin’s decaying propaganda costume and leaves it exposed in the gutter of its own contradictions. Peskov did not just contradict earlier statements. He unwittingly pierced the Kremlin’s own fiction and sprayed its lies across every burnt-out Ukrainian home and hospital. If there is a discussion to be had about stopping strikes on civilian targets, then those strikes must be happening. And if they are happening, then the denials—like those Peskov gave after the Kryvyi Rih massacre—are not misstatements. They are evidence of systematic lying.
Putin, for all his theatrical bravado, presides not over a sovereign state but over a mafia structure pretending to be a government. He has long hidden behind grotesque claims of “precision strikes,” “military necessity,” and “NATO provocation.” The April 4 missile attack on Kryvyi Rih did not accidentally hit a military warehouse or some fictional biolab. It killed twenty civilians and wounded seventy-five. That is not collateral damage. That is terror by design. And yet Peskov, the shameless mouthpiece of this autocratic rot, insists that “our military strikes exclusively on military and military-related objects.” His performance is a blend of Soviet-style gaslighting and Monty Python farce, except the blood is real and the rubble used to be people’s homes.
Sergey Lavrov, ever the condescending relic of diplomatic decay, claimed the Russian Federation “did not set a goal to harm Ukraine’s energy system.” That lie drowned beneath the concrete of bombed transformer stations and the shattered turbines of hydroelectric plants. According to the International Monetary Fund, by mid-2024, eighty percent of Ukraine’s thermal generation and forty percent of its hydroelectric capacity had been reduced to debris by Russian missiles. That level of destruction does not come from vague misfires. It comes from a deliberate strategy to freeze civilians, cripple hospitals, and extinguish light from lives. To say otherwise is to spit on the ashes of those facilities while still holding the torch.
Every false denial and clumsy deflection by the Kremlin’s spinners is not just a lie. It is preparation of the information battlefield, a component of cognitive warfare where truth is not merely bent but tortured until it whimpers in Russian. Peskov, Putin, and Lavrov have not only overseen war crimes—they have drafted the scripts meant to disguise them. But when their own words betray them, the fiction collapses, and what remains is the stench of deliberate brutality soaked in the vocabulary of cynical statecraft.
Russia should not be at a negotiating table. It should be in the dock at The Hague. Putin’s regime has turned disinformation into a weapon more consistent than any missile, with Peskov playing the obedient stenographer of state-sanctioned savagery. His words on civilian targeting were not a misstep. They were the courtroom confession of a morally bankrupt empire choking on the lies it has used to sustain its war of annihilation.
Let no one speak of legal obstacles. The only obstacle left is the courage of the international community to treat Russia not as a state actor but as a criminal enterprise that has weaponized every level of its bureaucracy to inflict death, erase truth, and call it sovereignty.
