So, who fired two drones at the Kremlin in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, and what does the act say about the course of the war in Ukraine?
The whole business is a mystery, and may remain so forever, except to those who did the deed. The two questions are, of course, related; the intended impact on the war depends on who launched the weapons. But there might also be separate impacts, depending on who the combatants think fired the shots. So, it may be worth scurrying down the rabbit holes of straight or madcap logic to examine the possibilities.
Russian officials point their fingers at Ukraine and say the attack was an attempted assassination of President Vladimir Putin—thus giving Moscow leave to respond in kind, i.e., to assassinate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Some observers see the claim (which Ukrainian officials deny) as evidence that the drones may have been a “false flag operation”—an attack concocted by Putin and his cronies in a way that would miss Putin (or any other Russian) but give them an excuse to kill Zelensky.
Putin has some history with false flags. In 1999, just after President Boris Yeltsin appointed Putin prime minister, several buildings were bombed in Moscow and other Russian cities. As was later learned, the culprits were Russian state secret police officers trying to whip up popular frenzy against Muslim terrorists—which is exactly what Putin proceeded to do, using the attacks as an excuse to step up the war in Chechnya. The operation, often likened to the Nazis’ Reichstag fire, propelled Putin’s ascension to the Kremlin’s helm after Yeltsin stepped down.
For this week’s drones, though, the false flag theory seems a stretch. Putin has already tried to kill Zelensky several times; he needs no contrived rationalization to try again, or to escalate his violence against any other target in Ukraine. He has managed to escalate plenty on his own.
Drones over the Kremlin also create the impression that the war has made all Russians everywhere, even the Russian state’s top leaders, vulnerable—and that can’t be a good feeling for people who look to their leader to keep them, at the very least, secure.
It’s possible that Putin’s megalomania has reached such heights that he thinks his own endangerment at the hands of Ukrainian murderers would whip the Russian people into a frenzy of patriotism and renewed support of the war. Perhaps, but there’s no sign the war is in need of such renewal; his absolute rule, control of national media, suppression of all critics, and ability to mobilize an endless stream of new recruits seem to be giving him all the support he needs.
Still, who knows how Putin’s mind works? In the realm of that dark catacomb, the craziest schemes might be mistaken for masterstrokes.
Another possibility is that the drones were fired by Russian rebels—either ordinary citizens critical of the war or dissident military officers. Most citizens opposed to the war, and to Putin, have either gone into exile or been locked up in jails, but a few adventurous saboteurs may well have stayed behind to wreak what havoc they can manage. It has long been reported that many career officers are leery of the war—some from its beginning, more as its disastrous course has killed or maimed so many of their brightest soldiers and spoiled the fruits of two decades of military reform. If either of these groups is keen to weaken Putin, it wouldn’t hurt to expose the skies over the Kremlin as porous.
That leaves the Kremlin’s charge: that this was the work of Ukraine. If true, it’s doubtful the shots were meant to kill Putin. For one thing, he may not sleep in the Kremlin, and if he did that night, a couple of low-yield drones, set to detonate in the air, would have been unlikely tools to disturb his slumber.
But, as with the theory about domestic saboteurs, the drones may have been meant to screw with the minds of Russians, to make them nervous about Putin’s continued rule. In this sense, the targets may have been two kinds of Russians: ordinary citizens, whose sons and husbands have been turned into cannon fodder for Putin’s war; and the elite, who now see that Putin can’t fully protect himself, much less extend his shroud over their own lives and fortunes.
Is it technically possible for Ukraine to have launched this attack? The distance between the Russia-Ukraine border and the center of Moscow is about 270 miles. So, yes, a drone could get that far, especially if it were armed with a fairly lightweight bomb, as these bombs appeared to be—and lightweight would be fine, if the target were Russians’ fear, not any particular Russian.
True, President Joe Biden and other Western allies insist that Ukraine not use U.S. or NATO weapons to hit targets inside Russia, for fear that this might cross one of Putin’s “red lines” and escalate the war. This concern is the main reason why Biden won’t let Ukraine have F-16 jet fighters or ATACMS missiles.
However, there seems to be no prohibition on letting Ukrainians hit Russian territory with their own weapons. They have been doing so for quite some time. Just in recent days, there have been attacks—almost certainly launched by Ukraine—on Russian rail lines, electrical plants, oil refineries, and, most notably, an oil depot in Crimea (which Russia certainly regards as Russian territory).
Kirill Shamiev, a researcher on civil-military relations and a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, is the most persuasive of those who think Ukraine fired the drones—or who at least find this theory more compelling than other theories.
“It seems to me that Ukraine’s political leadership is doing its best to destabilize Russia’s domestic political situation,” he said in an interview with Meduza, one of the leading online journals published by Russian exiles. The attack, he said, is “another symbol of the fact that … Putin is losing.” It “scares people … [that] Moscow and the Kremlin aren’t safe, something is still going wrong.”
If he’s right (and again, nobody knows just yet), the Ukrainian army’s much-anticipated counteroffensive may already have begun.
