On February 24th, 2020, Vladimir Putin ordered a forceful incursion into Ukrainian lands under the pretext of denazifying Ukraine. Unlike previous Russo-Ukrainian conflicts, the unfolding events gained significant visibility thanks to rapid dissemination of information through (online) media platforms. Besides frontline battles, a parallel war was being fought by the Ukrainian and Russian presidents to control and shape the narrative of the armed conflict. In view of the above, this study focuses on Putin’s strategies to engage with public opinion. In particular, I study Putin’s metaphorical utterances (e.g., Charteris-Black, 2005) in a corpus comprising 121 public speeches and 226.455 tokens, subdivided in two different spans of time. Metaphors, in this context, serve as a window into Putin’s discursive strategies for persuasion and manipulation but also, they showcase how Putin perceives and linguistically construes the conflict (Musolff, 2017). Employing a mixed-method approach, I a