'It doesn't make sense': Experts question the Kremlin's account of that drone strike
CBC
When it comes to symbolic, made-for-TV moments, the alleged drone strike on the Kremlin early Wednesday morning ticks almost all of the boxes.
Foreign policy and defence experts say the dramatic, full-colour, unverified CCTV camera footage of some kind of object exploding in the predawn darkness just below a fluttering Russian flag is a propagandist's dream — at least for ultra-nationalists in Moscow worried about maintaining the morale of a war-weary public ahead of a planned Ukrainian counteroffensive.
The fact that Russian media quickly claimed it was an attempt by Ukraine to assassinate Russian President Vladimir Putin (who was not at home in the Kremlin at the time) and the fact that the explosion caused no casualties and little damage have only deepened the experts' suspicion that the flag pole blast was (ironically) a false flag operation by Moscow's security services.
Ukraine vehemently denies it was responsible.
WATCH: Unverified video appears to show drone hitting Kremlin
President Volodomyr Zelenskyy, who is in Helsinki for meetings with allies, said he believes Moscow staged the attack to galvanize public opinion in Russia.
"We don't attack Putin or Moscow," Zelenskyy said. "We fight on our own territory."
What's interesting to many observers is how there are just as many disadvantages as advantages for the Kremlin in accepting Russia's version of events.
Yes, it could whip the Russian public into a frenzy ahead of the annual May 9 Victory Day celebrations, commemorating the Nazis' defeat in the Second World War. It also looks like an enormous embarrassment for a defence and security establishment that has sustained a series of humiliations since the full invasion of Ukraine began, said a Kyiv-based defence expert.
A drone crashing into the flagpole at the Kremlin — slipping through the air defences of one of the most heavily guarded districts on the planet — would represent a major "military failure" of the sort that typically leads to heads rolling, said Oleksandr Musiienko, the head of the Center for Military and Legal Studies in Kyiv.
It wouldn't even be the first time Russia has been embarrassed from the air. In 1987, a German teenager named Mathias Rust evaded Soviet air defences to land a rented Cessna light aircraft near Red Square — an event that prompted the sacking of a number of high-level Russian military leaders.
Both Musiienko and Sean Maloney, a historian and expert on Soviet Cold War tactics, said they don't accept the Russian version of events — including the claim that it was an attempt on Putin's life.
"It's either reflexive to deflect on their part, to deflect against weakness, or it's all part of something they've already pre-scripted. It's one or the other, probably," said Maloney.
He said the initial Kremlin reports were stilted and made little military sense.
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