RUSSIA PERSPECTIVE

Moscow does not mention its own missiles. TASS, Russia's official news agency, publishes no dispatch on the strikes that killed 14 Ukrainian civilians across four cities. Its only story from that night covers Tuapse: "A terrorist drone attack on residential buildings has claimed the lives of two minors, aged five and 14." Governor Kondratiev extends his "profound condolences to their families."

The narrative inversion is total and deliberate. In TASS's lexicon, Ukraine commits "terrorist attacks" on "residential buildings." Russia does not attack — Russia does not exist as an aggressor in this dispatch. The 19 Iskander-M ballistic missiles, the 659 drones, the 703 aerial targets Ukraine had to intercept: nothing. The 12-year-old child in Kyiv, the 7 dead in Odesa, the burning apartment blocks in Dnipro: nothing.

This silence is not passive censorship — it is active narrative construction. By publishing only about Tuapse, TASS builds a story in which Russia is the victim of Ukrainian terrorism. The word "terrorist" is not accidental: it dehumanizes the adversary and delegitimizes any Ukrainian military response. It is the Kremlin's codified vocabulary since 2022, where the phrase "special military operation" linguistically forbids the word "war."