Russia likely staged attack on Kremlin – ISW

Russia likely staged an attack on the Kremlin in an attempt to bring the war home to a Russian domestic audience and set conditions for a wider mobilisation of Russian society, analysts at the Institute for the Study of War believe.

Source: an ISW report

Details: The ISW states that several indicators suggest that the strike was designed by Russia internally.

Quote: "Russian authorities have recently taken steps to increase Russian domestic air defence capabilities, including within Moscow itself, and it is therefore extremely unlikely that two drones could have penetrated multiple layers of air defence and detonated or been shot down just over the heart of the Kremlin in a way that provided spectacular imagery caught nicely on camera.

Geolocated imagery from January 2023 shows that Russian authorities have been placing Pantsir air defence systems near Moscow to create air defence circles around the city. A strike that avoided detection and destruction by such air defence assets and succeeded in hitting as high-profile of a target as the Kremlin Senate Palace would be a significant embarrassment for Russia.

The Kremlin’s immediate, coherent, and coordinated response to the incident suggests that the attack was internally prepared in such a way that its intended political effects outweigh its embarrassment. The Kremlin immediately accused Ukraine of conducting a terror attack, and Russian official responses coalesced rapidly around this accusation."

More details: The ISW believes that had the drone attack had not been internally staged, Russia’s official reaction would probably have been much more disorganised at first, as Russian officials tried to create a consistent message and counterbalance the impact of what was clearly an embarrassment from an informational point of view.

"The Kremlin has notably failed to generate a timely and coherent information response to other military humiliations not of its own making, including the falls of Balakliya and Kherson City in September and November 2022," the Institute states.

"The rapid and coherent presentation of an official Russian narrative around the strike suggests that Russia staged this incident in close proximity to the 9th May Victory Day holiday in order to frame the war as existential to its domestic audience. The Kremlin may use the strike to justify either cancelling or further limiting 9th May celebrations, actions that would likely augment the information effort framing the war in Ukraine as directly threatening Russian observance of revered historical events," the ISW report says.

Background: 

• The Kremlin’s press service has claimed that Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles "attempted to launch an attack" on "the Kremlin residence of Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia." The Kremlin called the attack a "planned act of terrorism" and "an assassination attempt on the President."
• Serhii Nykyforov, spokesman for President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said that Ukraine had no information about last night’s attack on the Kremlin.
• White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has said that the United States could not yet confirm the credibility of reports of a drone attack on the Kremlin.

Journalists fight on their own frontline. Support Ukrainska Pravda or become our patron!