The war is returning with increasing force to the places the Kremlin has spent years portraying as islands of normalcy—Moscow restaurants, Black Sea beaches, and the like. Yet instead of addressing why the war has reached these supposedly peaceful spaces, the Kremlin offers viewers a carefully scripted narrative of "resilience."
The recent death of yet another Putin-era general in a Moscow restaurant, together with the deaths of civilians on a beach in Arkhipo-Osipovka near Gelendzhik, where a drone crashed despite the efforts of the "world's best air defense system" (after all, according to the daily reports from the Russian Ministry of Defense and regional governors, "all targets have been intercepted"), has exposed a new trend in Russia's information policy: suppressing the consequences of attacks while constructing a new sense of "normality."
The FSB Opens Its "Canning Factory"
First, consider the case of General Yerusalimov, who had the misfortune of attending the birthday celebration of another general—Russian Aerospace Forces Commander-in-Chief Viktor Chaiko—at an Italian restaurant in central Moscow. Only last May, Putin promoted him to the rank of lieutenant general. By August 2026, however, Yerusalimov had been killed in an explosion and quietly buried under a veil of military secrecy.
