St Petersburg politician Nikita Yuferev demands a criminal case against Vladimir Putin for breaking his own law (Picture: Nikita Yuferev/east2west news)
A Russian politician has reported Vladimir Putin for using the word ‘war’ to describe the conflict in Ukraine.
Nikita Yuferev, an opposition councillor in St Petersburg, asked prosecutors to investigate the president for breaking his own laws.
Putin has so far only described his invasion as a ‘special military operation’, and introduced legislation threatening Russians with a jail sentence for spreading ‘deliberately false information’ if they describe it as a war.
However, on Thursday he told reporters: ‘Our goal is not to spin the flywheel of military conflict, but, on the contrary, to end this war.’
Yuferev said he knew his legal challenge would go nowhere, but said he made the report to expose the ‘mendacity’ of the system.
He said: ‘It’s important for me to do this to draw attention to the contradiction and the injustice of these laws that Putin adopts and signs but which he himself doesn’t observe.
‘I think the more we talk about this, the more people will doubt his honesty, his infallibility, and the less support he will have.’
Yuferev began the legal challenge in an open letter, written to the prosecutor general and interior minister, saying ‘hold Putin responsible under the law for spreading fake news about the actions of the Russian army’.
Putin told reporters he wants to ‘end this war’, despite jailing Russians for using the same terminology (Picture: EPA)
He also said critics who have publicly called the conflict a war have suffered harsh punishments.
Opposition politician Ilya Yashin was jailed for eight and a half years this month for spreading ‘false information’ about the army.
In July, local councillor Alexei Gorinov was sentenced to seven years for criticising the invasion.
Yuferev has said he has reported other top Kremlin figures for using the word ‘war’, including Sergei Kiriyenko, deputy head of the presidential administration, and leading lawmaker Sergei Mironov.
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However police said they had either done nothing wrong, or refused to even look into the case.
Yufurev has received hundreds of hate messages since he published his open letter, but he believes the majority of Russians understand what is happening in Ukraine.
He said: ‘War, in Russian society, is a frightening word. Everyone is brought up by grandparents who lived through World War two, everyone remembers the saying “Anything but war”.’
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An opposition councillor has decided to legally challenge Putin.
