A Duma deputy calls for liquidating Kyiv's leadership: "For Budanov, not even a Zircon is a waste"

This is not an anonymous internet comment. It is not a studio guest warming up. It is the first deputy chairman of the defence committee in Russia's State Duma, and the statement is that Ukraine should be forced into capitulation through the physical liquidation of the people at the very top of power in Kyiv.

Alexei Zhuravlyov named the target too: Kyrylo Budanov, the head of the Ukrainian president's office. For him, as he put it, "not even a Zircon is a waste" - the Russian hypersonic missile considered one of the most expensive items in the Russian arsenal.

"We must force Ukraine into capitulation by destroying its top people," Zhuravlyov said, adding that Budanov had killed senior Russian officers and asking why those "vampires" are still alive and why they are not sitting in basements like rats, but instead gathering, holding parades and meetings.

When an invitation to murder is read from a podium

With this, Zhuravlyov openly demanded that the Russian army target Ukraine's highest political and military leadership, arguing such strikes should form part of the pressure that would force Kyiv to accept capitulation.

This is not the first time he has spoken in this register, and that is precisely the point. When statements like this come once, it is an outburst. When they come repeatedly, from a man holding office on the defence committee, and nobody in the system reacts - that is no longer an outburst, it is a tone.

There is a difference between war and a call for assassination, and that difference is exactly what international law has spent decades trying to keep standing. Striking a military target is one thing. Publicly demanding the liquidation of named people at the top of a state is another - and it has a different name.

The most unsettling part is not the statement. The most unsettling part is the silence that follows it. Nobody denied it, nobody distanced themselves, nobody said this is not the position of the institution that man sits in. And in politics, what goes undenied becomes permitted.

The Balkans have a long archive of podiums from which something similar was demanded, and an even longer archive of people who later insisted those were only words. Words usually are only words - until one day they stop being.