Vladimir Putin has a new comparison for the war in Ukraine. It is not geopolitics, not NATO, not history. It is about orcas hunting polar bears.

He made the remark in front of students and professors at a Moscow university. The conversation about animals began when Putin asked a teacher from the Belgorod region, who had been to the North Pole, whether he had seen polar bears there. The teacher answered that he had seen two, enormous ones. Putin explained to him that orcas live nearby and feed on them.

"Over there nearby, the orcas hunt those bears and swallow them without any trouble. They come down on them in packs - and then, boom, they tear them apart," the Russian president said.

From the food chain to the special military operation

Then came the point. "Yes, that is the food chain. Children should learn about it so they understand what kind of world we live in and why we are conducting the special military operation," said Putin, who still uses that term for the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

So the explanation for the largest war in Europe since 1945, delivered to students, runs: in nature the stronger eats the weaker, children should know that. Not sovereignty, not security guarantees, not a single one of the arguments Moscow presents before international institutions. The food chain.

The bear as an old prop

The bear is not new in Putin's vocabulary. After the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, he compared Russia to a bear the West is trying to put in chains, warning they would try to pull out its "teeth and claws".

"Maybe our bear should sit quietly, not chase piglets around, but just eat honey and berries. Maybe they should leave it alone? They will not. They are trying to put it in chains," he claimed at the time.

Twelve years later the metaphor is turned inside out. In 2014 Russia was the bear being tied up. Now the bear is the prey and the orcas are the attackers. The only constant is that Russia is always the one suffering, no matter which animal it plays.

The context the speech did not mention

The remark came while air raid alerts across Ukraine had been sounding almost without a break for the third day running. The day before, at least 37 people died in the Kyiv region. On the same day Putin was telling students about food chains, two girls - aged 14 and two - were killed in separate strikes.

The Balkans knows this technique by heart: when the argument does not hold, you change the genre. From law you move to history, from history to nature, and from nature to something that can neither be disputed nor checked. That is not an explanation but an escape from one.

And the fact that the sentence was spoken in front of students - the people who will be running that country in ten years - is the part worth remembering. That was not a slip in conversation. That was a lesson.