Now targets of the armed forces in Kyiv are to be attacked, from which "information attacks against Russia" would be carried out, the Russian military announced on Tuesday afternoon.

"Ukrainian citizens who are being used by Ukrainian nationalists for provocations against Russia" and local residents should leave their homes, it said.

In the capital, the television tower was badly hit soon after.

Ukrainian sources reported five dead.

Thomas Gutschker

Political correspondent for the European Union, NATO and the Benelux countries based in Brussels.

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Frederick Smith

Political correspondent for Russia and the CIS in Moscow.

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According to Ukrainian sources, the Russian military is also shelling residential areas in other cities.

Reports also came from Kharkiv on Tuesday that Russia had fired on a hospital.

According to the official information from Moscow, all of this should be "excluded", only "military objects" are attacked.

But the "soft targets" of Russian attacks are reminiscent of earlier war missions, as is the use of vacuum bombs and cluster munitions.

Even the Russian population, which has been preparing for days for a largely bloodless "liberation" of the Donbass in particular, is now being prepared for hardship.

More and more Russian regional leaders are reporting that someone has fallen from their area.

One from the Krasnodar region, two from Chechnya, they say.

It's not a comparison to the assumed numbers - but it is a break with the pure practice of concealment of the first few days.

On Monday evening, the Ministry of Defense also published for the first time images of what it claims to be its own successful helicopter attack – presumably because up to now only the Ukrainians have disseminated images of drone strikes, for example, and thus had a motivational advantage over Moscow in the “information war”.

Such images spread

After the failures and losses of the first few days, the military leadership should now make progress as quickly as possible.

The fight on the ground is particularly difficult, especially with regard to Ukraine.

In Chechnya, where Putin waged a brutal and extremely costly war from 1999 onwards that established his popularity in the first place, there lives a rebellious Muslim hill tribe whom many Russians were at least suspicious of.

Thus "strangers" were the opponents.

The same is true in Syria, where the "cleansing" on the ground was largely left to Assad's troops and militiamen controlled by Iran.

Head down towards the Ukrainians

Now, on the other hand, Russians have to take action against Ukrainians in the neighboring country, who are supposed to be “brothers” and, according to Putin, even “one people”.

Ukrainian videos from the first days of the war showed Russians struggling to carry out their conquest tasks: a young man in uniform sits with his head bowed in front of Ukrainians who curse in Russian and demand that he return to Russia;

Tanks dodge angry civilians;

a crowd with blue and yellow flags surrounded Russian soldiers.

The goal of “denazification” announced by Putin at the beginning of the war and now also by the military is intended to help overcome inhibitions.

Accordingly, one fights less against soldiers than (without any conceptual distinction) against "Nazis", "Neo-Nazis", "Fascists", "Nationalists".

From the end of 2013, with the start of the pro-European protests on the Kiev Maidan, Moscow was trying to portray nationalist groups as leaders in the ranks of the opponents.

Now the fiction of a "Nazi" Ukraine is used to demonize the opponents.

This should not only create support among their own population, but, following on from the Second World War and the fight against the Nazi conquerors, also motivate their own soldiers, national guards and special police officers to make them believe that they are fighting absolute evil.

The Ukrainians and Ukrainian "nationalists" are already being accused of atrocities and a "genocide" in the Donbass;

the competing attorney general's office and investigative committee make such allegations that, on closer inspection, seem flimsy.