Conventional weapon that still works and kills
People has always been using the language not only for basic communication but also for persuasion and propaganda. Language is a very powerful tool in any war. Skilled language users can achieve a lot in both good and bad sense. Russian state media channels successfully using the language for propaganda. The state resurrected the belligerent rhetoric of the Cold War era to scare people and support its information war.
I've recently came across an interesting article written by Iryna Matviyishyn, a journalist at UkraineWorld and Internews Ukraine, and published by the Atlantic Council in 2020 in which she talks about weaponization of the Russian language in Ukraine. Putin started the war in the Ukraine on the pretext that Russian Language and Russian-speaking population in Ukraine have been discriminated and needed protection and that Ukraine should not be a separate state but a part of Russia.
If you speak Russian, you perhaps noticed a switch in using prepositions "в" and "на" with "Ukraine" (think Prepositional case of location). If I remember correctly this switch happened in 2014 and became a clear sign of one's position toward Ukraine's independence. A simple sentence can reveal speaker's political views. Russians who support Ukraine's independence, Russian opposition and against the war will say "в Украине", while Russians supporting the state will most likely say "на Украине".
Attitude toward the Russian language in Ukraine is changing now and many switch to Ukrainian. Before the war, Russian was used as lingua franca among people from the countries that were part of the former Soviet Union. As a famous Russian-speaking Ukrainian journalist Dmitry Gordon said, Putin doesn't own the Russian language. In the war, the language is not only a powerful weapon but also a victim.
