Why has Russia been silent for six hours about downing of Kinzhal missiles? 

It is absolutely impossible to talk about strikes on the centers of decision-making. If there was at least one photo of the destruction of buildings, they would have said so. But there is only a photo of a burning car.

Therefore, all Russian state propaganda resources reported that the Patriot air defense system was hit in Kyiv by a high-precision strike by the Kinzhal hypersonic system. And the Russian air defense system intercepted seven Storm Shadow cruise missiles overnight, the Russian Defense Ministry said. We all understand why seven Storm Shadows. There must be at least a little more than the 6 Kinzhals that were shot down by Ukrainian air defense.

And I think this is a great reaction. Instead of taking real steps, the Russian authorities have chosen to create a parallel reality for the people of Russia. This once again confirms that Timothy Snyder's opinion is correct: when Russia suffers a total defeat in this war, they will simply crawl back into their borders and tell their own population that it was a victory. They have already done so in fact.

“Instead of taking real steps, the Russian authorities have chosen to create a parallel reality for the people of Russia. This once again confirms that Timothy Snyder's opinion is correct: when the Russian Federation suffers a total defeat in this war, they will simply crawl back into their borders and tell their own population that it was a victory. They have already done so in fact.”

Russian propagandists have experienced, as they say, several unpleasant information waves that have demoralized and added panic to what is now coming out of Russian television. But there is also an interesting significant change. Ukraine's acquisition of long-range weapons has resulted in a deluge of threats against the UK with terrorist attacks and sabotage. However, these threats are indirect. They are not in the style of “we are not there” and will not be. Some partisans. Someone will take responsibility.

Even the most hardened of them avoid directly threatening, as they did before, with strikes on Europe or the British Armed Forces, nuclear weapons and radioactive ash. Moreover, a significant difference is that the red lines have been completely forgotten. Margarita Simonyan even said that all the red lines were invented by television propagandists and that this is not the position of the authorities. That is, suddenly, after the exchange of blows with serious weapons, it turned out that there was nothing to threaten?

Is this why the Russians will be plunged back into hybrid wars and crawl away from talk of World War III and a direct clash with NATO? It is too early to say so, but this is the path they are on.

Specially for Espreso.

About the author. Olha Len, journalist.

The editors don't always share the opinions expressed by the authors of blogs.