I’m skeptical of a false flag operation. As Horatius noted above, conducting a drone attack on what’s presumably some of the most protected airspace in the country either demonstrates: 1) a foreign enemy has exposed the military’s weakness by penetrating their defenses, or 2) domestic enemies are at work and getting bolder. In either case, it sends a message 180 degrees from what Putin has been attempting to sell the past year.
Some comments on drone attack:
I’m leaning heavily towards false flag.
- The Kremlin was issuing press releases about the attacks almost immediately. When the Ukrainians actually attack something they shouldn’t be able to, the Kremlin denies the story using increasingly unlikely cover stories. See: Moskva, storm damage.
- No reports of any air defense activation. There are Pantsir AA missile systems covering central Moscow. Clearly they didn’t shoot down the drone, but we’re supposed to believe they didn’t even engage? Perhaps this is ignoring the possibility of gross incompetence or negligence, but still.
- The detonation looked like pyrotechnics, not actual high explosive. Do you see big fireballs in those drone dropping grenades videos? No. Because real HE does not make a big fireball. Movie pyrotechnics do, because they’re after a spectacular fireball and not a visually unimpressive but deadlier shockwave. A little drone like that would be carrying a small HE warhead at best. Counterpoint: maybe it was an incendiary payload? Seems unlikely, because then you’d want something like napalm that sticks and burns a while. Burning off instantly in one big flash isn’t how you set buildings on fire.
- What set off the detonation in the first place? The drone is flying over the building. What sort of fuse triggers when you fly past a flagstaff? GPS? But then you’d program the drone to dive into the ground when it reaches target coordinates and use a standard fuse.
This is speculative and could easily be wrong, but it feels fakey to me.
And how is this an assisantion attempt if Putin was no where near where it happened? Does Putin even go outside except for photo ops these days? Why would the Ukrainians attack the Kremlin with what amounts to toy drones in the first place? It makes no sense to me that they would waste an opportunity and expose themselves and their position in Moscow for a pubilicity stunt.
Let us assume it was an assassination attempt.
So what?
Visual damage from first hit on dome?
A false flag needs to have a credible “cui bono.” I can only think of one, and I’m not sure it’s valid (or even psychologically relevant).
The Russians are painting this as an attack on Putin and it’s clearly an attack on a building which is the center of Russian government.
Have the Russians attacked Ukraine’s buildings of government, other then the attempted storming in the very first days of the war? I hadn’t heard whether the Russians’ much-vaunted cruise missile and drone capabilities have been unleashed on Mariinskyi Palace (the official Presidential residence), the Presidential Office Building, or the Verkhovna Rada building (the parliament).
Maybe a false flag would allow the Russians enough cover to start “retaliatory” attacks in kind.
The main thing that bugs me about this suggestion is that the Russians haven’t seemed to need excuses for any number of horrific escalations, so why this?
The reason for a false flag operation wouldn’t be as justification for escalation; it would be to drum up more nationalism and support for the war.
But I’d suspect Russian dissidents first, an independent Ukrainian group second, and false flag third.
One suggestion I’ve seen is that it is aimed at creating a patriotic response. More Russians will, by this theory, volunteer to go into the Ukraine meat-grinder. Here are some expert-authored tweets along these lines:
Or they don’t have the ability to do so using randomly aimed artillery, and no air force that could get close enough.
Here’s the dome visible in a previous May 9 Red Square parade:
It’s visible from ground level:
If it wasn’t the Russians who did the drone attack, I’d be nervous sitting near Putin, or indeed if I was Putin:
I misread that as, "“Here’s the drone visible in a previous parade,” and was wondering just how long that thing was hanging around Red Square.
I could be that they were less trying to inflict damage than to show that they could get something there.
Also possible that it was a false flag, and that Putin just wanted an excuse to escalate. If that’s the case, then it’s a very, very bad thing, because Putin only has one escalation left. But I don’t think that one is too likely, because
As for why Russia hasn’t yet flattened the Ukrainian seat of government, there’s only one answer for that: Because they can’t. They have no reason to hold back: It’s no more an “off-limits” target than anything else they’ve attacked.
One reason to hold back is that if they actually succeed in ‘liberating the Ukrainian people’, having the seat of government intact for the surrender and subsequent puppet regime make good propaganda.
If it’s a false flat, which I doubt, it would be to rally people to the Russian side.
There are so many ways this could have gone sideways as a Ukrainian strike or a Russian false flag that I think it almost has to be freelancers of some ilk (dissidents or Ukraine sympathizers living in Russia.)
I’m not sure how effective that would be, though. Do very many Russians have a personal loyalty to Putin? There are plenty who are loyal to Mother Russia, and plenty who approve of Putin as a ruler (though probably not as many of those as he claims, either), but neither of those is the same as personal loyalty, to the point that a (purported) assassination attempt on Putin would energize them.
Now, if he really wanted to energize the people with a false flag attack in Moscow, he’d have chosen St. Basil’s, or something similarly historic and iconic.
I also think that Russian dissidents are the most likely explanation, but I wouldn’t be shocked if it were Ukraine.
I usually try hard to avoid anything remotely in the realm of a conspiracy theory, but this being false flag seems likely.
I can’t see how this was an Ukrainian attack on Vladimir Putin. From what I am reading, he is known for not spending a lot of time at the apparently targeted building (although it does have a presidential office). A team with enough sophistication to get a drone right over such a sensitive spot would have known that.
You could say they weren’t specifically trying to kill Putin, just to humiliate his regime. But the Kremlin was successfully defended. Being subject to a failed attack is not a humiliation. One might say – wouldn’t it have even more of a non-humilation if the drones had been shot down over a forest thirty miles away? Yes and no. That would have been a non-event. The drones had to come in close to the center of power to be a dramatic triumph.
As shown in the photos in this thread, the allegedly attacked building is a prime backdrop for the enormous televised Victary Day parade scheduled for next week. The attack will swell the hearts of Russian patiots, living in the pro-Putin media monocultue, every time they see the dome.
As for the drones having been launched by anti-Putin Russians, the same reasons apply for that being implausible as is the case with making Ukrainians the masterminds.
A former Russian lawmaker linked with militant groups in Russia claims the recent drone attack on the Kremlin is the work of what he calls Russian partisans, not the Ukrainian military.
In an exclusive interview, Ilya Ponomarev told CNN’s Matthew Chance that “it’s one of Russian partisan groups,” adding that “I cannot say more, as they have not yet publicly claimed responsibility.”
Ponomarev, who now lives in exile in Ukraine and Poland, was the only Russian MP to vote against the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014 and has since been included on a list of terrorist suspects, according to the Russian authorities.