Moscow has openly framed its relentless bombardment of Ukraine as punishment. The Kremlin said on Monday that Ukraine was paying the price for its own strikes on Russian territory in recent months — and would continue to do so as Russian forces systematically hit targets across Ukraine.
The statement landed on the same day Russian drones and missiles again tore into Kyiv, killing at least seven people and wounding more than 50, while Ukraine's army kept pushing Russian forces back in the east. It was, in effect, Moscow's official justification for a campaign of terror against civilians: we warned you.
Peskov frames the bombing of cities as payback
Responding to a question about how Ukrainian strikes on Russia had affected Moscow's stance on peace negotiations, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Monday: "Ukraine will have to pay a price for the actions that have taken place in recent months. This is what is happening now. Our armed forces are continuing the special military operation."
The message could hardly be more explicit. Russia's defence ministry said the same day that its forces had struck fuel and telecommunications infrastructure in Kyiv, two data centres, gas stations, and several cargo vessels it alleged were supplying the Ukrainian military. Reuters could not independently verify those claims.
Independent reporting, however, documented what those strikes actually hit. Drones slammed into apartment buildings, offices and the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kyiv, leaving four dead in the capital. In central Dnipro, a drone struck an office building during working hours, killing three people and wounding 12. Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha called the attack on the Academy a deliberate act of cruelty.
This is the Kremlin's standard moral inversion: it hits universities, apartments and clinics, then describes the killing as a bill being collected.
Putin's Friday message: ready for talks, full of conditions
The Kremlin's threats were paired, as always, with a performance of willingness to negotiate. On Friday, Vladimir Putin said Moscow had been ready to resume negotiations with Kyiv after September's parliamentary election in Russia — but complained that Ukraine launched a major attack on Moscow during the vote, targeted polling stations, and carried out a drone attack on St Petersburg during a major economic forum in June.
Putin added that all proposals to settle the four-and-a-half-year-old war remained on the table, but that Moscow needed to assess what was in its own interests — the classic Kremlin formulation in which "negotiations" mean talks conducted under the pressure of continuing bombardment.
The contradiction is not subtle. Hours before rejecting German calls for de-escalation at the UN General Assembly, Russia's top diplomat brushed off what was believed to be the first face-to-face meeting with his German counterpart since the full-scale invasion began in 2022. The aerial war, meanwhile, showed no sign of slowing.
A familiar script: talks as cover for escalation
Ukrainians have seen this pattern for years. Moscow offers the language of diplomacy while intensifying strikes; it then blames Kyiv for the breakdown and escalates again. The "price" Ukraine is supposedly paying is being extracted from nine-story apartment blocks, university buildings and office workers.
Kyiv's long-range drone campaign against Russian oil refineries and military infrastructure is a legitimate military response to an invasion — striking the war machine, not nurseries. Moscow's answer has been to widen the target list to Ukraine's cities and civilian infrastructure, exactly as it has done since the first months of the full-scale war.
The stakes of this rhetoric are real. Behind the threats, Ukrainian forces continue to advance: the Third Army Corps said on Monday it had recaptured another 51 square kilometres in northern Donetsk under Operation Vivaldi, with the Institute for the Study of War assessing the operation has achieved the "operationally-significant" goal of disrupting Moscow's encirclement of Ukraine's eastern fortress belt.
Russia can call its bombing campaign a "price" all it wants. Ukrainians call it what it is — a war of aggression against a sovereign country — and they are still taking their land back.
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