CIA / Ukraine Likely Tried to Kill Putin at Home with his Family
In light of our recent wild rampage abroad, we need to revisit events in Russia from several weeks ago. They demand a full and open U.S. national investigation.
Just before the New Year, Donald Trump and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky were meeting in Florida. Before that meeting, Trump also spoke with Vladimir Putin for an hour. Our wheeler-and-dealer President, despite his ongoing sulk about not getting a Nobel Peace Prize, was still trying to end the Ukraine war.
“I think we’re in the very final stages of talking,” Trump said then, adding, “It’ll either end or it’s going to go on for a long time, and millions of additional people are going to be killed.”
The next day, Russian government officials announced a swarm of attack drones had been launched overnight from Ukraine, aimed at Putin’s family residence in the Novgorod Oblast (or region). The Russian Defense Ministry reported it had shot down all 91 drones. The Foreign Ministry called it a “terrorist attack”.
Putin called Trump the next morning to complain. Asked about it soon after, Trump sounded upset. Zelensky had just left Florida, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu was the next guest (that guy is always here!), and at a press event, Trump was asked by a reporter about “the strike, the alleged strike, on Putin’s residence.” He replied, “Yeah, I don’t like it. I don’t like it.”
“President Putin told me about it. Early in the morning he said he was attacked. It’s no good. It’s no good … I was very angry about it.”
Trump said that with the Ukraine-Russia peace negotiations underway, “It’s a delicate period of time. This is not the right time! It’s one thing to be [militarily] offensive. Because they [the Russians] are offensive. It’s another thing to attack his house. It’s not the right time to do any of that.”
The Novgorod residence is a sprawling complex on the shores of Lake Valdai. It’s a back-to-nature getaway the boss can use to escape the nation’s capital, sort of like Russia’s version of America’s Camp David. Leaders from Nikita Khrushchev to Boris Yeltsin have over the decades made use of the area, but Putin — who is coming up on 27 years in office — has made extensive improvements and really settled in.
At the time of the drone strike, Putin was not home. But judging from the white-hot rage expressed by Russian officials and Russian media going into New Year’s Eve and in the week after, his family might well have been. His long-time girlfriend Alina Kabayeva and, unofficially, their two sons Ivan, about 11, and Vladimir, about 7, apparently spend most of their time there.
It’s been reported that the air defenses around this single lake house complex are equivalent in size to about a fifth of the air defenses of the massive city of Moscow.
Russian officials from Putin on down have said they believe most strikes deep inside Russia are guided by American intelligence. With the attack on the Lake Valdai residence, this was again the theme, but with an ominous new overtone: Russia insisted that American intelligence services had just been complicit in, if not the guiding hand behind, an attempt to kill Putin, and / or his family.
“I said right away that it’s impossible [to carry out this attack] without support from [Western] intelligence services — first and foremost the CIA,” said Aleksei Chepa, deputy chair of the Russian State Duma’s Committee on International Affairs.
That U.S. intelligence services are guiding Ukrainian missiles and drones to their targets inside Russia has been made pretty explicit by now.
Two massive New York Times reports — in February 2024 and in March 2025 — have laid some of this out. The March 2025 report, titled “The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine,” cited more than 300 interviews with military, diplomatic and intelligence officials around the world, and recounted how U.S. soldiers and CIA agents under Biden “received the green light to enable pinpoint strikes deep inside Russia itself.” An unnamed “European intelligence chief” was quoted then as observing of these American officials: “They are part of the kill chain now.”
Even so, the official West came out with a chorus of skepticism about Valdaigate. Within a day, the CIA had “assessed” that the event never happened, or at least, any drones flying into Russia that day weren’t headed for Lake Valdai. Zelenksy called it a “fabrication.” A flood of “fact-check” stories filled social media to deride the idea, and to mock the Russians for being helpless liars. The Russians bridled further, and pointed at photos and videos they’d published of what were said to be the downed Ukrainian drones.
On Jan. 2, as the argument escalated, the Russians summoned a U.S. military attache in Moscow to a formal meeting, where top Russian military officials handed over what they said was a drone’s navigation chip. They encouraged our decryption specialists to examine the chip. In a 90-second video of the ceremony, the American side accepts the offering without much comment. The Russians seem convincing and sincere.
One day later, on Jan. 3, American special forces blew into Caracas, killed about 100 people, and kidnapped Venezuela’s president. Suddenly the question of whether the CIA had just tried to kill Putin fell from the headlines.
By Jan. 5, and after receiving CIA briefings, Trump said he now did not believe Ukraine or his CIA had ever tried to kill Putin at Lake Valdai. “I don’t believe that strike happened,” Trump told reporters. “We don’t believe that happened, now that we’ve been able to check.”
A little more than three weeks after that, Trump — in a CIA-guided operation — assassinated the leader of Iran.
The Russian account of a 91-drone attack on the lake complex where Putin’s girlfriend and two young sons spend all of their time was an absolutely wild development. My personal sense is that the Russians are telling the truth about it. I also find the supposed fact-checks to be unconvincing to the point of being ridiculous. Most of them mirror the non-logic of the insane New York Times headlines after the Nord Stream 2 bombing that suggested Russia had blown up its own Russian gas pipeline just to scare the crap out of us all.
Back to the Valdai drone swarm: What would we have done if these war-berserk idiots — following the same ethos that led them to sneak-attack Venezuela and steal their president, then sneak-attack Iran and murder their leadership — had killed Putin’s family, or Putin himself?
Do we have any idea what the Russians would have done? Who might have taken charge upon Putin’s demise? What a new, revenge-minded Russian leader might have done to poor Ukraine, or to Europe, or America?