When the war on Ukraine began, the official Kremlin term for it was spetsial'naya voennaya operatsiya, or "special military operation," sometimes abbreviated as "SVO."

To call it anything else, if you were a journalist or a blogger, could mean jail.

Roskomnadzor, the Russian media regulator, has threatened to shut down Wikipedia unless it removes the entry entitled "Russo-Ukrainian War," even though, where the English original is encyclopedic in scope, the Russian version of the article is only a couple of paragraphs long and contains nothing, apart from the title, that the Kremlin might find objectionable.

​A mere month into the war, however, it all began to change.

As the Russian army's human casualties, dead and wounded, began to approach the 50,000 mark, and more than a third of the tank armada that had thrust into Ukraine went up in flames, something funny happened with the Kremlin media.

At first in a few publications, and a day or two later in nearly all of them, the month-old term "special military operation" got truncated, and the brand-new term taking its place was simply spetsial'naya operatsiya, or "special operation," sometimes abbreviated as spetsoperatsiya.

The word "military" has suddenly been dropped from the daily vocabulary of propaganda.

​So whether one listens to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, or to Russia's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, or to any number of television talk show hosts who have made their names and fortunes spouting propaganda, one will rarely hear them mention the good old "SVO" in Ukraine nowadays.

Words are proving to be powerful symbols.

Since February 24, when the Russians invaded Ukraine, a huge effort has been made by the Kremlin propagandists to banish the word "war," which accurately describes what the regime has unleashed, not only from reports in the media, but even from private discussions.

The state was quick to give teeth to the prohibition, promulgating a law whereby any deviation from the official Kremlin representation of the Russian army's aims or conduct in Ukraine is defined as malicious disinformation, with prison terms for those who flout the law.

Ukraine, for its part, has banned some symbol in the wake of the Russian invasion.

For example it has banned the letter Z with which the invader's tanks are emblazoned.

Several European countries in solidarity with Ukraine have even followed suit, while in Switzerland the Zurich Insurance group is dropping its world famous corporate logo, a white Z in an azure field.

For the moment, Moscow appears intent in eliminating "military" from it's "non-war" on the Ukraine.

​It could be that, in the Kremlin's view, the truncated term is more convenient when having to explain to the average Russian why the attempt to conquer Ukraine is ending in anything other than a debacle of historic proportions.

A simpler way of putting it is that "military" has just too much "war" in it, and wars, unfortunately, need to be won before dictators can brag about it.