Sarah Rainsford - In Russia, the truth has been criminalised. Lies are a weapon of war

BEFORE February 24, I don’t think I’d ever called Vladimir Putin a liar on air but when Russia’s president launched his invasion of Ukraine, claiming he had to “save ” Russian-speakers from “genocide”, I was in Ukraine and I knew that was a lie. Journalists don’t often use the word, but it felt important to be crystal clear: there was no genocide and this was no “special military operation”, as Putin pretended. It was all-out war.

The first explosions jolted me awake in eastern Ukraine just before 5am, though I’d struggled to sleep at all that night. Curled up on my motel bed, I’d watched online as Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky appealed directly to the Russian people to avert the invasion, though he must have known by then it was hopeless.

I’ve reported on Russia for the BBC over more than two decades and I know what Putin is capable of. I’ve charted his crushing of democratic rights and freedoms, his previous wars in eastern Ukraine as well as Chechnya and Georgia and the growing hostility in relations with the West. Last August, as the campaign against free speech intensified, I was expelled from Russia, labelled a “security threat”.

Even so, when I watched Putin’s snarling address broadcast as Russian troops began rolling across the border, I realised I was shaking. It wasn’t only the invasion itself that disturbed me so much, it was the brazenly false justification for an assault that would soon include the bombing of residential areas and murder of civilians.