Russian President Vladimir Putin is facing calls to be investigated after explicitly referring to his "special military operation" in Ukraine as a "war."
The Russian president on Thursday publicly referred to the conflict in Ukraine as a war for the first time since ordering a full-scale invasion nearly 10 months ago.
Putin and other Kremlin officials had previously avoided using the word, while insisting that the "special military operation" was needed to protect Russians who were living in Donetsk and Luhansk—two of the four Ukrainian regions that Putin later claimed to annex for Russia.
Shortly after the war in Ukraine began, Russia effectively criminalized media referring to the conflict as a "war" after passing a law against "spreading fakes" about the Russian military in early March.
A number of anti-war Russians have been prosecuted and sentenced to prison for characterizing the "special military operation" as a war or making critical comments about the conflict. Some called for Putin to face the same standards soon after his statement on Thursday.
Nikita Yuferev, a St. Petersburg lawmaker who is living in exile due to his anti-war views, sent a letter to the Russian prosecutor general on Thursday that claimed Putin was violating the law by "spreading information that Russia has started a war."
Yuferev argued that Putin should face penalties that include fines and "imprisonment for a term of five to 10 years," urging the prosecutor to investigate the Russian president and enforce the "law for spreading fakes about the actions of the Russian army."
"The war was not declared," Yuferev said in a tweet while sharing the letter. "Several thousand people have already been condemned for such words about the war. I sent an appeal to the authorities to get Putin involved for spreading fakes about the army."
Fellow Russian exile Georgy Alburov, an associate of jailed Putin opposition leader Alexei Navalny, also called for Putin to be imprisoned over the remarks on Thursday. Alburov argued that Putin should receive the same treatment as his critic Alexei Gorinov, who was prosecuted and jailed for "spreading fakes" last summer.
"Alexei Gorinov was sentenced to 7 years for calling the war a war at a meeting," Alburov tweeted, according to an English translation. "Vladimir Putin today also publicly called the war a war in the workplace. So either let Gorinov out, or put Putin in jail for 7 years."
In addition to criticism and calls for equal treatment from Russians who oppose the war, Putin is also facing difficulties in satisfying Russians who were strongly in favor of the invasion of Ukraine.
After losing around 100,000 soldiers in the conflict, backlash over military setbacks has forced the Russian president to recently ramp up "efforts to make peace with the critical pro-war nationalist community," the Institute for the Study of War said on Wednesday.
Newsweek has reached out to the Russian Ministry of Defense for comment.
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