Unverified videos that circulated online Wednesday purportedly show the aftermath of the attack, which Russia says it thwarted by shooting down the drones.
Moscow has accused Ukraine of attempting to assassinate Russian President Vladimir Putin using the drones, a claim Kiev has outright denied.
The attack will likely have a “rally around the flag” effect in Russia, leading some to speculate it may be a “false flag” operation staged by the Kremlin to bolster support ahead of Victory Day on May 9, an annual holiday to celebrate the Soviet defeat of Nazis in WWII.
“It looks to me like Putin and his handlers are constructing a fake provocation with this so-called terrorist attack that Russia can use as an excuse to rain down even more pain and suffering on the Ukrainian people or possibly use to justify an assassination attempt on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky,” said Beth Knobel, a former CBS bureau chief in Moscow and now a communications professor at Fordham University.
“Ukraine has nothing to gain by inflaming Russia further with an assassination attempt on President Putin,” she added, noting that the claim of an assassination attempt was far-fetched, given Putin is widely known to reside at a complex outside Moscow.
Analysts have pointed out that there’s no independent verification of the supposed attack. There’s also scrutiny over why Moscow didn’t report the incident until hours later or why the videos of it were not released for some time.
Zelensky on Wednesday denied that Ukraine was behind the incident.
“We didn’t attack Putin,” he said at a press conference with Nordic leaders in Helsinki.
His presidential adviser, Mykhailo Podolyak, said the Russian claims would give Moscow a pretext “to justify massive strikes on Ukrainian cities, on the civilian population, on infrastructure facilities” in the next several days.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken, while speaking at a Washington Post event, said he had seen the reports but could not comment on them “without really knowing what the facts are.”
He warned the public should “take anything coming out of the Kremlin with a very large shaker of salt.”
Read the full report at TheHill.com.
