Vladimir Putin has publicly admitted something usually kept behind military secrecy: the missile strike on the Kyiv region with the „Oreshnik” missile wasn't a classic military operation, but - a test. „I'll reveal a big state military secret. We simply struck where it was convenient for us to observe the results,” the Russian president said. In other words, the target wasn't the enemy, but his own measuring instruments.

Putin added that Russia hasn't yet used the „Oreshnik” „in the true sense of the word” for combat purposes, and that the strike let them track how the warheads scattered - measured, as he put it, „to the millimetre.” When a leader speaks with pride about the precision of a weapon falling on a city, precision stops being a technical detail and becomes a message.

Because Putin didn't stop there. The data from the test, he said, will inform „the future full use of the Oreshnik on certain targets, including those in populated areas.” That's a sentence worth reading twice. „Populated areas” means people - and deliberately targeting civilians or civilian infrastructure, under the Geneva Conventions, constitutes a war crime.

The „Oreshnik” has been used three times so far: November 2024 on Dnipro, January 2025 on the Lviv region, and May 2025 on the Kyiv region. Each time as a „test,” each time on real places with real people. For the Balkans, which know first-hand what it means when war is waged „for a message” rather than for territory, statements like these aren't abstract geopolitics - they're a reminder of how easily civilians become a testing ground for someone's calculations down to the millimetre.