https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/05/03/world/russia-ukraine-news# Live Updates: Russia Claims It Foiled a
The Kremlin claims the incident was a terrorist attack. Here’s the latest.
The Kremlin claimed on Wednesday that Ukraine had launched a drone strike at President Vladimir V. Putin’s residence overnight. The two drones were disabled by state security services and Mr. Putin was uninjured, the Kremlin said.
It was not immediately possible to verify the Russian claim, and a Ukrainian official said Kyiv had “no information about the so-called night attacks on the Kremlin.”
In a statement, the Kremlin said it “regards these actions as a planned terrorist attack and an attempt on the president,” and reserved the right to retaliate. It said that “timely actions taken by the military and special services” had disabled the drones, causing some debris to scatter on the Kremlin grounds.
Mr. Putin was not in the Kremlin at the time of the incident, according to his spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov. There were no casualties, the Kremlin said.
If confirmed, it would be the most audacious attempted strike on Russian soil since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February last year.
Local and regional authorities in Russia have reported a series of drone strikes in recent months. Some have landed close to Ukraine’s border with Russia, but at least one has hit south of Moscow. Ukraine has not acknowledged responsibility for most of the incidents. Moscow is around 280 miles northeast of the Ukrainian border at its closest point.
Last month, The Washington Post reported that the United States had secretly monitored discussions among Ukrainian officials about possible attacks against Moscow timed to coincide with the Feb. 24 anniversary of Russia’s invasion. The White House feared that such a move would provoke an aggressive response from Moscow, and two days before the anniversary, the C.I.A. said that Ukraine’s intelligence directorate “had agreed, at Washington’s request, to postpone strikes” on Moscow. The information was part of a trove of classified U.S. intelligence documents obtained by The Post and other news organizations.
Putin has established identical offices in multiple locations, all furnished and decorated the same in every detail, with matching desks and wall hangings, according to Gleb Karakulov, a captain in the Federal Protection Service responsible for guarding the president who defected and recently gave interviews about his experiences. In live broadcasts it would be impossible to discern where he was.
Official reports sometimes described Putin as being in one place when he was actually somewhere else, Mr. Karakulov told the opposition news outlet the Dossier Center in early April.
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to President Zelensky, said the claim of an attempted drone attack on the Kremlin is a sign that “Russia is clearly preparing a large-scale terrorist attack.”
A spokesman for Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, told Radio Liberty that “we have no information about the so-called night attacks on the Kremlin.” Sergei Nikiforov said that “Ukraine directs all available forces and means to liberate its own territories, and not to attack others.”
Putin always operates inside a heavily guarded security bubble. His security team checks every building and office that he works in ahead of his arrival and his main working residence, the Kremlin, has been likened to a medieval fortress.
