Jens Asbjørn Bøgen
As Russian missiles knock out Ukrainian power again, Moscow is rewriting the vocabulary its own newsrooms use to describe the war.
Russia’s war against Ukraine is approaching its fifth winter, and the campaign against Ukraine’s power grid has become the Kremlin’s main tool for pressuring Kyiv as temperatures drop. Inside Russia, that campaign is now being wrapped in a very old brand.
The Presidential Administration’s political bloc has instructed state and Kremlin-aligned outlets to describe the attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure as “Putin strikes,” the Russian independent outlet Meduza reported on October 21, citing two employees at Kremlin-aligned media and a political consultant who works with the administration.
According to Meduza, the guidance tells editors that “our ballistic weapons have performed flawlessly” and that the strikes “far exceed” what Ukraine has achieved against Russian targets. The consultant told Meduza the point is to tie Putin personally to visible wartime results and lift his standing with “ultra-patriotic” voters.
A WWII script, dusted off
The branding is modeled on the “Ten Stalinist Strikes,” the propaganda label Joseph Stalin introduced in a November 1944 speech to describe that year’s Red Army offensives against Nazi Germany. The phrase personalized a sweeping military campaign around a single leader and became a fixture of Soviet war mythology before being retired after Khrushchev denounced the Stalin cult in 1956.
The reach for a Stalin-era frame comes as Putin’s numbers slip. The Public Opinion Foundation, a Kremlin-aligned pollster known as FOM, recorded his approval rating at 71 percent in early October, down from 75 percent in July. Trust in him fell from 74 to 70 percent over the same period.
Already in the headlines
The vocabulary is already appearing in print. Gazeta.ru, Rosbalt, Novye Izvestia, Fedpress and Segodnia.ru have all run items using the phrase within days of the directive, Meduza reported, with Novye Izvestia headlining a piece “Putin Strikes on Ukraine: Ukrainian Military Left Without Electricity and Weapons.”
The rebrand lands as Russia widens its physical campaign. Ukraine’s air force recorded a wave of overnight attacks on October 19 in which Russian forces struck 28 substations and other critical energy facilities across 11 regions with 16 ballistic missiles and more than 200 drones. At least 550,000 households lost power.
Earlier in the month, emergency outages hit Kyiv on October 7 and 8, cutting water pressure in parts of the capital and briefly halting metro trains. Ukrainian officials have said this winter will be worse than previous ones, with Russia expanding its strike capability since the summer.
The attacks continued after US President Donald Trump announced on October 11 that both Moscow and Kyiv had agreed to pause strikes on energy sites. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov dismissed the arrangement, telling TASS that “Russia needs peace, not a ceasefire.”
