Cui Bono? Even if the drones hit their tagret there was no way they were gonna kill Putin in one of the most fortified buildings outside the Kremlin.
As stupid and irrational as some of the ukrainian commanders are, is there really anyone who would think doing this attack while trump was meeting zelensky was going to help their cause? They all know that Trump is annoyed with ukraine more than he is annoyed with Russia. Someone with the stripes to organize a strike with 91 long range drones must have just a little bit more foresight than to think this would be a good idea. (There could be a deep cover Russian asset inside Ukraine who could organize this but that is a tiny bit too “007” for real life)
Russia isn’t against playing dirty they are just way better at hiding it.
That the attack happened while zelensky was having a meeting with trump is a perfect way to spoil the “last person he talked to” effect on trump in fact it would likely cause an inversion of trump’s mood toward zelensky. (a very “judo” style move of redirecting the opponent’s momentum and using it against them.)
Putin was the guy to tell trump and I’m pretty sure trump trusts Putin more than he trusts most of the people in his own administration.
I can imagine Putin on the phone to trump, hamming it up, acting angry and irrational and saying he is going to kill zelensky. Putin would let trump talk him down which would work his ego. (imagine trump telling the story of how he saved zelensky’s life and stopped a nuclear war in a single phone call)
Meanwhile Putin would extract concessions from trump “Ok I wont nuke keiv or shoot down zelensky’s plane, but I have to do some big strikes or my people will think I’m going soft, you understand. Tell you what I just launch a couple Oresniks at some military targets. It’ll be a big show but it won’t be radioactive and it wont kill millions of civilians.”
Its a way to get trump’s understanding that Russia is going to do a K.O. strike and that it’s the only way to get ukraine to accept the reality that the war is lost. Russia gets to do an attack that could spark a nuclear war under other circumstances.
I don’t think so. The Banderites really are this dumb and desperate. They already tried to hit the Kremlin once. Why wouldn’t they do something like this? After all, their only hope is dragging NATO or at least some of the Europeans in to officially join the war, and for that they need to provoke Russia into some sort of major escalation. That’s why they keep doing terrorist attacks that do nothing to change the military situation. They want to enrage Russia into an attack with massive collateral casualties.
Russia has no interest in rocking the boat at this point when everything is going their way and they are winning on every front (militarily, economically and diplomatically). They want to keep everything going smoothly and calmly at exactly the pace they are going now, where they are inflicting maximum attrition on the Ukrainian forces at minimal cost to themselves, while advancing just slow enough to keep the conflict from escalating beyond Ukraine.
That’s why Russia doesn’t respond impulsively to provocations, no matter how much the turbo-patriots on Russian telegram make fun of Putin and call him a cuck. That would be giving the Kiev Nazis exactly what they want. And when they do officially “respond” they just do so with more of the same that they would have done anyway, which is probably what will happen with this latest episode of FAFO.
Yes there are individuals like Zelensky who are complete incompetents but to think that the entire command structure is just banging their head against the wall doing the same thing over and over expecting different results is not good analysis.
They’ve tried this move a dozen times and even when it lands a hit it never has the effect you are describing. Assuming the ukrainian command are 100% incapable of learning from the past is kinda dehumanizing them.
I wont say it is impossible that they did do it but it just feels more likely that Russia staged it because it is doing nothing but good things fro Russia and nothing but bad things for zelensky.
Firstly i’d like to say that we can’t really know for sure either way right now, so we’re both just guessing, so it’s completely fine if you disagree.
Second, as to whether
the entire command structure is just banging their head against the wall doing the same thing over and over expecting different results
well…what choice do they have? They are smart enough to see the trajectory that they are on if things continue as they have for the past couple of years. The math is just not mathing in Ukraine’s favor. If nothing changes, they are heading slowly but inevitably toward total defeat.
So they have to take risks. They have to try and change the status quo somehow, even if there is a risk of it backfiring and blowing up in their face. And this is not doing the same thing they have done a hundred times before, this one was undoubtedly a qualitative escalation.
I think it’s wrong to frame it as if
the ukrainian command are 100% incapable of learning from the past
and leaving aside the question whether it’s really the military command making the decisions on things like this or if it’s the political leadership forcing them to do it, or maybe even the GRU acting independently, consider this:
How often have they found themselves trapped in cauldrons and instead of pulling out, saving their men and reforming further back on more defensible lines, they choose again and again to do the opposite: funnel in more troops into the cauldron where Russia has set up the most efficient conditions for a kill box, and try and hold out to the last, way past when it would have been advantageous to stay there, and losing immense amounts of resources in the process.
Why do they do this? Is it because they are stupid and incapable of learning from the past? No. It’s because they have no choice. It’s because Russia, like any good chess player, has put them in a Zugzwang where they are forced to choose between bad and worse.
The Kiev regime lives and dies off of PR. They are forced to take militarily disadvantageous actions in order to not appear like they are losing too fast. They depend on the confidence of their international backers. They cannot be seen to be giving up ground. They have to commit to costly and strategically pointless counter-attacks to keep themselves in the headlines.
The same goes for their various terrorist attacks and reckless provocations like this one. It’s not that they are too stupid to see that this is very unlikely to change the military situation to their advantage, it’s that they have no choice. They need to boost morale in their own ranks by “scoring victories”, even if it’s through assassinations and terrorism.
And they need to do something, anything, no matter how desperate, to try and change the paradigm, to get off of the trajectory they are currently on where the math simply dooms them to death by a thousand cuts if this keeps going as it has been going so far.
We see the cracks in the front widening. We see Russia’s advances accelerate. We see them taking multiple towns in a single month now where before it would have taken them multiple months to take a single town.
The Ukrainians have to keep trying to escalate.
Agree a lot with this. Just wanted to add here:
and leaving aside the question whether it’s really the military command making the decisions on things like this or if it’s the political leadership forcing them to do it, or maybe even the GRU acting independently, consider this:
It could also be orders from outside the country.
As for the overall idea of it being a false flag by Russia, I just don’t see them doing anything differently with this that they couldn’t have used any of a bunch of other different and unmistakably ‘Ukrainian’ attacks as a reason for it. I mean, they didn’t even do much visible stuff against operation spiederweb, so I don’t see this being a false flag and would be a little surprised if there were qualitative changes to how Russia is acting.
As always blame the CIA
Meanwhile Ukraine killed 24 people by striking at the cafe in Kherson oblast (so on people they consider “theirs”) precisely at 00:00 today.
Nazis are willing to do any unhinged shit to kill more people, so I do believe they tried to kill Putin as well, terror attacks are in their playbook.
There’s no reason for Russia to set up such an elaborate operation because they’re not in a position where they need to trick the US. They’re winning on the battlefield and they hold all the cards here.
It makes far more sense that the US would convince Ukraine to do the attack and then use it as an excuse to drop them by pointing to how unhinged they are. The reality is that it’s the US and not Russia that needs an off ramp here. Trump desperately wants to dump Ukraine, but he can’t do it politically because there’s internal pressure from the hawks in the US and the Europeans. This sort of stunt provided the needed pretext.
It makes far more sense that the US would convince Ukraine to do the attack and then use it as an excuse to drop them by pointing to how unhinged they are.
It’s a microcosm of the whole war from the U.S. perspective: it’s best if Ukraine succeeds, but fine if they fail, too.
exactly, ultimately the US has no skin in the game and as long as slavs keep killing each others the Americans are pretty happy
So, what the CIA is claiming is that Ukraine did attack but they weren’t trying to attack Putin, just other targets very close to Putin, as if Russia is supposed to take that any less seriously in any case.
I think it’s fair to question the lack of material evidence, but Ukraine is uhinged enought to do this (they did go for the kremlin before) so it’s at least plausible. A false flag seems pointless? What would Russia even get from it?
I wouldn’t discount this as a false flag outright. I have no idea.
But the Ukrainian command are very interested in any sort of cheap stunt that can score them huge media points, especially before or during meetings with Western leaders. It’s not outside their usual MO. If the Ukrainians did it, and they keep true to form, like in previous events, then they’ll claim responsibility in Ukrainian media, right around the time the story starts dying down in western media.
Judging from who can gain from this, I’d say Ukraine has a lot more to gain than Russia.
Russia isn’t interested in dropping Oreshniks in Ukraine. Any damage they cause is damage they’ll end up paying for one way or another, and any Ukrainian civilian they kill, is less support from their relatives and friends for whatever peace they enforce on Ukraine. Russia is winning, Ukraine can do nothing about it. There’s no reason to escalate the war as far as Russia is concerned.
On the other hand, Ukraine has been trying for some time now to provoke Russia into precisely the kind of action you speculate about. They want Russia to get angry and do something outrageously vindictive, so EU armies (and perhaps US too) will have an excuse to deploy. Ukraine knows that its best hope right now is that either NATO intervenes and wins Ukraine back for them, or NATO intervenes and there’s an indefinite treaty-less ceasefire (and then hope that Ukraine can re-occupy lost territory in the next war, after they get refurbished and resupplied). They also need desperate morale boosters, both for their army and the civilian population. And at the very least they need the West to keep its attention on Ukraine, and for the West to believe that Ukraine is still capable of punching back, so they can keep getting funds (for the corrupt oligarchs) and arms (for the neo-Nazis) and some other stuff (for the people doing the actual fighting).
Every drone attack Ukraine has performed over the last year has been for these exact purposes. And every time, they came out after the fact to take responsibility (as a last attempt to rile up Russia, when Russia wasn’t biting, and to give their people the aforementioned morale booster). We’ve been through this multiple times: The Kremlin attack, the intermittent bombing of apartments in Donbass, Crimea, Rostov and Moscow, the bombing of nuclear-dedicated bombers, the bombing of oil infrastructure, the bombing of Russian freighter ships, the bombing of non-Russian freighter ships heading to Russia, the attempts to bomb Russian nuclear submarines, etc.
