25 August, 20:24
There are things that tell you more about an enemy's state of mind than any intelligence briefing. One of them is the way he explains his own war. Not how he fights it, not how many shells he produces, but how he explains it. An explanation is never really aimed at the enemy. It is aimed at your own people, and so it is an honest measure of what those people are still willing to believe.
On 25 August 2026, Anton Kobyakov, an adviser to the Russian president and executive secretary of the organising committee of the Eastern Economic Forum, gave an interview to the state news agency TASS ahead of the Vladivostok event. The genre would ordinarily call for talk of investment, logistics and Asian markets. Instead, Kobyakov announced that Russian troops had found documents in the abandoned headquarters of a Ukrainian territorial defence brigade, and that those documents named a specific date for a Ukrainian invasion of Russia: 8 March 2022. Russia, he said, got there two weeks first. He added that the war had been meant, symbolically, as a gift to Russia on International Women's Day, and that thanks to the foresight of the Russian leadership the would-be gift-givers received something else entirely.
Picture the setting. An economic forum, a pitch for investment opportunities in the Russian Far East, prospective partners from Asia, and, bundled into the same package somewhere between the slides on technology and joint ventures, an explanation of why Russia was the one that crossed someone else's border in February 2022. This is no longer propaganda for domestic consumption. It is an export product.
What matters is that this version is not the first. It is not even the third.
The devaluation of a cause
In February 2022 the stated reasons still sounded almost rational, at least by the standards of the language general staffs speak. Demilitarisation and denazification. NATO enlargement supposedly pressing up against the border. Security threats, guarantees, red lines. The wording was cynical, but it belonged to a world of maps, distances and flight times. You could argue with it as an argument, even knowing the argument was false.
Then the quick war failed to happen, and the language of security stopped working. You cannot spend years telling the world you are escaping a threat while dispatching fresh divisions into somebody else's country every month. Patriotism took over. Defending the Donbas, our people, our own, the eighth year of the conflict, the return of historic lands. The argument from security gave way to the argument from blood, which operates in a different register altogether: nothing needs to be proven, everything needs to be felt.
But patriotism has a breaking point too, and that point is measured in death notices. Once there are enough of them, you need something that cannot be refuted at all. So the war became holy. A theology appeared: not Russia against Ukraine, but traditional values against satanism, the last bastion against global evil, a battle for the soul of humanity. Exorcists moved into the propaganda studios and military analysis gave way to eschatology. The argument had been placed beyond verification, because no satellite photographs Satan and no intelligence service counts him.
And now, in August 2026, a fourth version comes out of the sleeve: Russia simply got there first. A pre-emptive strike. This is not degradation in the sense of one spokesman growing dimmer. It is inflation in the strict economic sense. So many causes have been printed that each new one buys less than the last, and to preserve any purchasing power at all you have to keep adding zeroes. One war has been explained by security, then by blood, then by God, and now by a ruined Women's Day.
What the date itself reveals
The most telling thing in Kobyakov's statement is not its content but the fact that 8 March is not new. Denis Pushilin, then head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk republic, announced the date on 6 March 2022, two weeks into the invasion, complete with documents found in a captured headquarters and a laptop bearing NATO markings. Sergei Lavrov repeated it that May in an interview with RT Arabic. But back then, and this is the point, the claim concerned a planned Ukrainian offensive against the Donbas and Crimea. That is, an operation inside Ukraine's internationally recognised borders, on Ukrainian territory, against Ukraine's own occupied regions.
Over four years the same myth has grown. An offensive in the Donbas has become an invasion of Russia. A Right Sector headquarters in a village near Donetsk has become the headquarters of a territorial defence brigade. The laptop has disappeared; the documents remain. Here is the mechanism of inflation not as theory but under laboratory conditions: a single fabrication revalued upward twice, because at its original denomination it no longer bought anything.
Why none of it survives contact with evidence
You do not need intelligence agencies for this part. Through late 2021 and early 2022 the world watched in real time as Russia massed more than 150,000 troops on Ukraine's borders. Commercial satellite imagery recorded it, available to any journalist with a subscription. Washington and London announced it week after week. It was debated at the Security Council. Against that, there is not a single image, not a single intercept, not a single piece of testimony showing Ukrainian offensive formations assembling for a mythical march into Russia. Not because they were concealed, but because an army of a hundred thousand cannot be concealed. It gives itself away through logistics, rail movements, field hospitals and fuel depots.
Then comes the arithmetic that turns the claim from false into comic. Picture Ukraine as it stood in February 2022, planning to advance alone, without allies, without air superiority, without a navy, without anything approaching parity in armour, into the territory of a nuclear-armed state. This contradicts not merely military doctrine but the instinct for self-preservation. To believe it, you must regard Ukraine's command as suicidal and simultaneously regard it as competent enough to pose an existential threat to Moscow.
The plagiarism they admit to themselves
Kobyakov's most revealing remark was one he seems not to have noticed. Justifying a pre-emptive strike, he invoked 22 June 1941, the date of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and said such a thing must never happen to Russia again.
It is worth following that construction all the way through. The rhetoric of the pre-emptive strike is not a Russian invention. In August 1939 SS men in Polish uniforms staged an attack on the radio station at Gleiwitz so that Hitler could tell the Reichstag the following morning that Germany was merely returning fire. That November the Red Army shelled its own village of Mainila, blamed Finland, and launched the Winter War. And in June 1941 Germany itself claimed it had simply forestalled a Soviet attack, and used precisely that claim to justify invading the USSR.
So an adviser to the Russian president takes Nazi Germany's argument of 1941, fits it onto Russia, and in the same breath tries on the role of 1941's victim. One man, one interview, two mutually exclusive parts. This is not a double standard. It is double-entry bookkeeping inside a single sentence.
A constantly changing rationale always means the same thing. A genuine reason is not rewritten; it is repeated, because it survives repetition. A reason that must be reinvented each time is a sign that the real one cannot be spoken aloud. And the real one here is dull in its banality: an imperial war to destroy a neighbouring state that had the temerity to exist separately.
Kobyakov's statement is an attempt to shift responsibility from the aggressor to the victim, made at precisely the moment when there is almost nothing left to shift it with. And the more absurd the versions become, the more accurately they show what a Russian official's word is worth: zero, multiplied by the number of times it has been rewritten.