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“Retaliation” headlines are a gift to the Kremlin—and a betrayal of Ukraine
After Ukraine’s stunning Operation Spiderweb damaged over 40 Russian strategic bombers on 1 June, President Trump took a 75-minute phone call with Vladimir Putin. Putin warned he would “have to respond,” Trump reported. Days later, as Russian missiles rained on Ukrainian apartments and cafes, Trump offered his analysis: the war was like “two young children fighting like crazy” in a park, and “sometimes you’re better off letting them fight for a while.”
The Kremlin loved it. Western media ran with “retaliation” headlines. But to mindlessly adopt the vocabulary of the aggressor is to excuse the crimes. At best, it’s lazy. At worst, it’s complicity by another name.
How Western media adopts Putin’s narrative
This latest episode perfectly captures a dangerous pattern that has defined Western coverage of Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Failing to grasp Russia’s criminal war for what it is — whether out of ignorance, indifference, or false hope of normalizing relations — telegraphs to Moscow not only America’s weakness, but its moral ambivalence, if not overt permission.
Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb was a singular event, while Russian suicide drones, guided aerial bombs, and ballistic missiles have hit Ukrainian cities with such regularity that they no longer make headlines — just body counts.
In the “retaliation” strikes that followed Spiderweb, Russian missiles killed Mykola and Ivanna, a young couple in Lutsk who were planning to marry — their bodies found in the basement after their eighth-floor apartment building collapsed. In Kharkiv, a 1.5-month-old baby and a 14-year-old girl were among 21 wounded in what officials called the most extensive attack on the city since the full-scale invasion began. A seven-year-old boy was injured when ballistic missiles struck near his school. Not statistics. People. Children. Faces that will never age.
Why Russia cannot be a victim of its own war
A rapist is not the victim of rape. A rapist is the perpetrator.
Russia is not — and cannot, by definition — be the victim of its own unprovoked war of aggression. It is the perpetrator. Apply even a shred of logic, and the distinction becomes obvious: Ukraine can retaliate. Russia cannot. Retaliation is a right reserved for the attacked — not the attacker.
While editorial errors were too many to count, the prize for the most cruel headline goes to The Washington Post, which recently described defensive strikes as “Ukraine’s dirty war.” As if targeting military assets inside an aggressor state were somehow morally equivalent to Russia’s daily slaughter of civilians.
The article itself was well-written and nuanced — alluding to the actual dirty war Russia has been waging against the West, from polonium poisonings in the UK to deployment of mercenaries to destabilize Africa — which makes the choice of headline all the more baffling. A free gift to Kremlin propagandists.
This is a war of conquest, not conflict.
Let us, once and for all, state the obvious: there is no “conflict” in Ukraine. This is a war of conquest — deliberate, sustained, and criminal under the very rules established after World War II.
Moscow’s war is not a tragic misunderstanding or a geopolitical chess match between great powers with Ukraine as a mere pawn.
Russia has been killing Ukrainians for the crime of being Ukrainian since 2014 — predictably, methodically, relentlessly. Ukraine is fighting because the alternative is not peace, but annihilation.
How Russia’s information warfare succeeds in the West
Moscow doesn’t separate kinetic warfare from the so-called “active measures” – disinformation, corruption, infiltration, sabotage, or covert operations — they’re all components of the Gerasimov Doctrine.
But the real scandal is not that Moscow deploys these tools — it’s that the West keeps falling for them.
Worse, we amplify them. Our commentators give airtime to lies. Our most respected outlets parrot enemy framing, wittingly or not. And all the while, a gang of war criminals in the Kremlin smiles, watching as we dignify their deceit with click-bait headlines and poison our own public discourse.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov eagerly seized on Trump’s playground analogy, calling the war “existential” for Russia.
In truth, it is existential only for Ukraine. For Russia, it is optional — a war of choice that could end tomorrow if Moscow stopped waging it. Each day it chooses otherwise, Russian war crimes compound. But when the White House implies both sides are comparably at fault, it reinforces the Kremlin’s central lie.
Ending the war is not in Ukraine’s hands. Peace will come when the revanchist zombie empire stops trying to re-colonize its neighbours.
America’s mixed signals embolden Putin
While Ukraine pleads for help, the United States, reportedly, diverted 20,000 anti-drone missiles — badly needed to defend civilian areas — away from Ukraine to other deployments. What Washington calls “balance,” Moscow reads as tacit acquiescence.
Under international law, Ukraine has the legal right to self-defense against Russia’s illegal war of aggression — a right explicitly affirmed in Article 51 of the UN Charter.
Russian attacks — whether by Iranian-sourced Shahed drones, North Korean artillery shells, or any other means — are not responses. They are the methodical continuation of a war it chose.
To call them retaliation is to legitimize the death and destruction Moscow unleashed.
The stakes: Putin’s victory means global tyranny
Russia’s own former Foreign Minister (1990-1996), Andrei V. Kozyrev, explained in a tweet: if Russia is not defeated in Ukraine, Putin’s dollar-hungry mafia state will solidify into a victorious militarist tyranny driven by hateful anti-Western ideology. Today’s warmongering and hollow nuclear threats against the West will then become real.
Since Moscow first invaded a sovereign neighbor — Georgia, in 2008 — the so-called Free World has excelled at self-deterrence, moved on to self-sabotage, and now flirts with self-extinction.
We can do better. But if we don’t, we’ll have no one to blame but ourselves.
Andrew Chakhoyan
Editor’s note. The opinions expressed in our Opinion section belong to their authors. Euromaidan Press’ editorial team may or may not share them.
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