Somewhere off Arbatskaya Square, a junior clerk is having the worst Tuesday of his career. The Defence Ministry's statement on the strike near Kyiv, which killed at least 37 people and tore through a care home in Bucha, went out with three place names left unchanged. Grozny survives in paragraph one. Aleppo in paragraph two. Mariupol in the third.
The ministry confirmed what the trade has long suspected: it maintains a single communiqué, in continuous service since 1999, updated only for geography. Every strike in it is precise. Every target is military. Every care home is an unfortunate neighbour of one.
"The document has never once failed to call a strike precise," said a spokesman, who asked to be identified only as the same spokesman as last time. "Why would we commission a second?"
Regular readers will recall Moscow's air defences downing drones Ukraine had not built yet. The press office, we now learn, runs on the same clock. The response is written before the event, and the event is slotted in afterwards, wherever it lands.
Asked whether the template had ever contained the word "sorry", the spokesman said it had, briefly, in 1999. It was cut for length.
