Zelenskyy’s ‘no rules’ allegation raises a command-accountability question

Volodymyr Zelenskyy (opens in a new tab) has made an unusually serious allegation about the way Russia is now conducting the Ukraine war (opens in a new tab): that Vladimir Putin (opens in a new tab) instructed senior commanders in September to abandon previous constraints on the air campaign.

The Financial Times reported Zelenskyy saying Ukrainian intelligence, including intercepted communications, pointed to such an instruction. He connected it to an escalation in attacks affecting energy systems and other civilian infrastructure.

That is a claim by the head of one belligerent state about the intentions and orders of the head of the opposing state. It should not be rewritten as an independently established command order merely because subsequent strikes appear consistent with the allegation.

The distinction matters because command responsibility depends on more than temporal correlation.

There are at least three separate evidentiary layers.

The first is whether an instruction actually existed and what it said. Public reporting does not provide the underlying intercepted material in a form that independently establishes its wording, provenance or context.

The second is operational behaviour. This can be examined separately. Reuters documented repeated Russian attacks affecting Kyiv’s Dnipro crossings on October 1–3, residential damage in the capital and deadly strikes elsewhere. The observable pattern is evidence of intensifying attacks on infrastructure. It is not by itself proof of a particular secret order.

The third is legality. International humanitarian law does not prohibit every attack on infrastructure that civilians also use. A bridge, energy installation or communications facility can potentially be a military objective when the legal tests are met. Even then, the attacking force remains bound by distinction, proportionality and precautions.

A phrase such as “no rules,” if eventually authenticated as an instruction to ignore those obligations, would therefore be highly significant. But Zelenskyy’s description and a legal finding are not interchangeable.

That evidentiary discipline is especially important when discussing Putin personally.

The 2023 ICC warrants for Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova (opens in a new tab) concern alleged unlawful deportation and transfer of children from occupied Ukrainian territory. They do not establish criminal responsibility for the October 2026 bridge or infrastructure strikes. Citing the existing warrant can provide context for international accountability mechanisms; using it as proof of a different alleged offence would collapse separate cases into one.

The underlying conflict originates in the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine (opens in a new tab), but even within a war of aggression, legal scrutiny still has to distinguish the decision to wage war from the legality of individual operations.

That is where the criticism-first accountability frame becomes more demanding than a political accusation.

If Ukraine possesses evidence of a changed Russian command directive, the strongest path is preservation and eventual disclosure of the chain: the communication itself, who issued it, who received it, how commanders implemented it, and which subsequent missions can be tied to that policy.

Strike-pattern analysis can then test whether behaviour changed after the alleged order. Targeting records, weapon assignments, damage data and command documents can test whether civilian protections were deliberately weakened.

Without that chain, the public has two things that should be reported side by side rather than fused: Zelenskyy’s allegation about command intent and independently observable evidence of an intensified Russian infrastructure campaign.

The distinction does not weaken scrutiny of Russian conduct. It strengthens the eventual accountability case by requiring the causal link to be demonstrated rather than assumed.