President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman informed Russians this week that the “special military operation” that Putin launched in Ukraine in February 2022 was set to go on much longer because it is now “a war against the collective West.”

That’s right: a war.

It was remarkable to hear that word from Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov. Journalists were explicitly banned from using it as the invasion began and thousands of Russians have been detained, fined and imprisoned for telling the truth about a war which has now been raging for almost two years.

“Moscow deputy Aleksey Gorinov was sentenced to seven years in prison for saying ‘war,’” Sergey Davidis, head of the Political Prisoners Support group, told The Daily Beast. He said over 20,000 Russians have now been detained and punished for protesting against the war. “That includes 131 Russians who have been sentenced to long prison terms in punishment for peaceful or for more radical anti-war actions,” he said. “I don’t think punishments against the war will now be milder after the Kremlin openly says ‘war.’ Putin will be next to declare it.”

The rhetorical escalation came in the same week that Alexei Navalny, Putin’s biggest domestic challenger, died in a Russian penal colony in mysterious circumstances. Weeks before the presidential election, the autocrat is flexing his muscles.

Alexei Navalny appears on a screen set up at a courtroom of the Moscow City Court via a video link from his prison colony during a hearing of an appeal against his nine-year prison sentence he was handed in March after being found guilty of embezzlement and contempt of court, in Moscow on May 17, 2022.

It’s not every Wednesday that Moscow says it is at war with Washington.

By “collective West” the Kremlin traditionally means 31 NATO countries and the 28 nations of the European Union. “This is a war when the countries of the collective West, led by the United States are directly involved in the conflict,” Peskov said.

Russia’s........

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