The Ukrainian president has said Vladimir Putin is ordering his military to abandon the rules of war and ramp up attacks on civilian targets.
“He said there are no rules now,” Volodymyr Zelensky told the Financial Times, describing intelligence that included intercepted communications from Kremlin officials.
Zelensky said Putin gave the order in September as the Russian leader increased strikes on schools, hospitals and data centers in Kyiv.
The escalation comes alongside Ukraine’s strikes on oil refineries, ports and warehouses deep inside Russian territory. Zelensky said Ukrainian intelligence believes Putin is retaliating for those attacks and has removed earlier limits on how Russian forces conduct their air campaigns.
Putin’s forces have struck civilian sites, schools, hospitals, kindergartens, residential buildings, homes, vehicles and orphanages since the war’s outset in February 2022, prompting Ukrainian and Western officials to accuse Moscow of war crimes.
Zelensky alleged that Putin has now ordered a sharp escalation in those attacks as Moscow seeks to regain the advantage in a conflict that has cost its forces heavily and yielded few recent gains.
The Ukrainian leader spoke from the bomb shelter of a Kyiv school struck by a Russian jet-powered drone. School director Valentyna Chorna told the FT that 104 students and 60 teachers survived by reaching the bomb shelter before the drone struck shortly after 9 a.m.
Zelensky said recent bombardments targeting civilian infrastructure aimed to “pressure” and frighten Ukrainians and destroy infrastructure. Moscow failed to capture the Donbas region, and was now pursuing “massive attack[s], massive killing,” the Ukrainian president said.
It comes more than four years into the Russian president’s grinding war in Ukraine, with Moscow suffering huge troop casualties and losing vast amounts of territory.
In an assessment dated Oct. 1, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said Russian forces had lost control of nearly 300 square kilometers between March and September. It assessed that Russia had lost a net 80.81 square kilometers in September alone. Citing the Ukrainian military, ISW reported 46,320 Russian casualties that month, “the highest monthly Russian loss rate so far in 2026.”
The Kremlin has denied targeting civilian sites. “Russia’s armed forces do not strike schools or hospitals,” spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told the FT.
Moscow has long portrayed its invasion as a “special military operation” against Ukrainian “neo-Nazis” and maintained that it has targeted military infrastructure. Ukrainian and Western officials say this is a false pretext to justify the conflict.
Attacking a military target is not, by itself, a war crime. Deliberately targeting civilians may be a war crime, as may using indiscriminate methods of attack that are likely to cause civilian deaths and destruction.
Ukraine’s education ministry has documented more than 4,700 Russian attacks on educational institutions since the conflict began, according to the FT. The newspaper said the World Health Organization had verified more than 3,000 attacks on health care facilities.
The Daily Beast has contacted Russia’s Foreign Ministry for comment.
