Vice President Sara Duterte’s impeachment trial turned Tuesday, July 14, 2026, on a semantic question with heavy legal weight: whether a public reference to Russia’s slain Romanov dynasty amounted to a threat against President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and his family, or merely a historical comparison.
Senator-judge Alan Peter Cayetano pressed his colleagues on the trial’s fifth day to resist labeling Davao City Acting Mayor Sebastian “Baste” Duterte’s remark as a threat before the evidence supported such a finding. “It’s fair that you’ve mentioned him. It’s fair sa investigation mo. But I don’t think we should draw a conclusion here that Mayor Baste was threatening the first family because, remember, there’s a thin line between a warning and a threat,” he told the court.
The Romanov reference surfaced through the testimony of the prosecution’s second witness, NBI regional director Atty. Jeremy Lotoc, who told the court that the bureau’s open-source review identified the mayor as the earliest known person to invoke the term publicly, at a Hakbang ng Maisug rally in Davao City. Lotoc quoted the mayor as saying, “When you go to bed tonight, think about the Romanovs.”
Cayetano offered his own reading of what that line meant. He argued the mayor appeared to be drawing a parallel between two dynasties driven from power, not issuing a warning of violence. “The Romanovs inubos sila para hindi nga makabalik. Now if Mayor Baste was making Romanovs, uubusin kayo Marcos. Eh ‘di dapat na-offend si Senator-judge Imee Marcos because she’s a Marcos,” he said, noting that the presence of a Marcos sibling on the court itself undercut the idea that the family had felt threatened.
The senator-judge also flagged the possibility that the two Romanov references heard at trial were not describing the same thing. “So the counsel for defense was making a distinction, mentioning Romanov and Oplan Romanov are two different things. It may be the same, it may be a different thing. For all we know, narinig ni Mayor Baste na sila ay iro-Romanov kaya binanggit niya pabalik. We don’t know, I don’t know,” he said, urging his colleagues toward caution. “So let’s be circumspect and careful from making conclusions.”
That distinction mattered because the defense has anchored part of its case on an alleged “Operation Romanov” it says was aimed at the Duterte family. Lotoc testified that investigators found no evidence validating claims that the supposed operation targeted the Dutertes, and the NBI ultimately classified the information as unvalidated. He recounted the bureau’s confusion at the sequence of events: if the Romanov reference began with Baste, investigators asked, why was a vlogger named Princess Maui later posing it as a question to the vice president?
The threat allegation traces to Duterte’s November 2024 online press briefing, where she said she had arranged for someone to kill Marcos, First Lady Liza Araneta-Marcos, and then-House Speaker Martin Romualdez should she herself be assassinated. The defense has cited Operation Romanov as the backdrop to those remarks, which Duterte made in response to Princess Maui’s question about a supposed plot against her family.
Fairness, Cayetano argued, had to run in both directions. “Everyone’s watching, in the same manner we have to be fair to the first family, we have to be fair to Mayor Baste and the Dutertes rather than draw a conclusion that there was an actual (threat),” he said.
Under questioning from Senator-judge Raffy Tulfo, Lotoc confirmed the bureau had concluded the alleged Romanov threat was directed at the first family rather than the Dutertes. Tulfo, who has said he first heard the term from Baste Duterte during a January 2024 forum in Davao, is expected to appear as a defense witness on that point.
