Half a year ago, the Russians were hopping mad, and reporting that a swarm of more than 90 military drones had just tried to blow up President Vladimir Putin’s home.
The Russian president was not there that day. But his family — long-time girlfriend Alina Kabayeva and their two sons Ivan, about 11, and Vladimir, about 7 — may well have been. (Putin and his first wife of 30 years had an apparently amicable divorce in 2014. The Kremlin has never officially acknowledged Putin’s second family, and so never commented on who was at home the day the drones arrived. But Russian media strongly suggested Kabayeva and the children were there.)
Putin telephoned America that morning to complain, and later that morning Donald Trump was upset on the Russian president’s behalf.
“President Putin told me about it. Early in the morning he said he was attacked. It’s no good. It’s no good,” Trump told reporters then. “I was very angry about it.”
“It’s one thing to be [on the military] offensive,” Trump added. “It’s another thing to attack his house.”
But as reviewed here two months ago, within just a few days, Trump and the U.S. government abruptly reversed this position. The CIA “assessed” that no such attack had ever happened. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky also called the story “a fabrication.”
Were the Russians making this whole thing up?
The attack was alleged to have targeted a Russian government complex on the shores of Lake Valdai in the Novgorod region. Russian media report the residence has sports facilities and even its own ice hockey rink, as well as massive air defenses, and that Putin’s family spends most of their time there.
In response to skeptics, the Russians pointed indignantly to video footage of the drones they had shot down, and on Jan. 2 took the extraordinary step of summoning a U.S. military attache to Moscow to formally present a navigation chip they said they’d recovered from one of the drones, urging American decryption specialists to examine it for themselves.
Did our intelligence services actually examine this evidence? No one’s ever said.
But President Trump, who had initially been sympathetic and upset after receiving that early-morning earful from Putin, within days stated he didn’t believe Putin any more. He said he now doubted claims that anyone had ever tried to drone-bomb Putin’s home.
“I don’t believe that strike happened,” Trump told reporters. “We don’t believe that happened, now that we’ve been able to check.”
In the midst of all this, American special forces attacked Caracas and kidnapped the Venezuelan president, followed quickly by the U.S.-Israeli assassination of the Iranian leadership and the Iran war debacle. The question of whether Ukraine +/- the CIA had just tried to kill Putin and / or his wife and children in their home was forgotten.
Yet the story will not go away.
It was too big an event, and it is in the minds of all of the major actors in the war.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky just referenced it in an open letter to Putin. That letter was billed as proposing a one-on-one meeting, but it was too larded with insults and threats to qualify as a peace overture.
Zelensky’s letter opens with the observation that Ukrainian drones had just attacked a high-profile annual economic conference in St. Petersburg that Putin himself had attended. Those drones — which, it should be remembered, are often if not always guided to their destinations by U.S. / NATO satellites and targeting teams — blew up oil refineries and military facilities all over the city this past weekend.
Zelensky shared a 26-second video montage of those attacks on his social media:
“[O]ur long-range drones paid a visit to the opening of your [economic] forum in St. Petersburg, covering a distance of more than 1,000 kilometers. As you know very well, that distance is not the limit of our capabilities,” Zelensky said in his open letter to Putin, and then continued in a taunting manner:
“We often hear that you are comfortable with this war. Of course, not in those cases when it comes to the security of your residence in Valdai or your parade in Moscow. Your own life is valuable to you.”
This seems very close to a direct admission by Zelensky that Ukrainian drones did indeed attempt to assassinate Putin and / or kill his family at his home in Valdai. (It also sounds like a threat to try again.)
Recall that immediately after the news broke of the Valdai residence attack and Trump pitched a fit, Zelensky called such talk of an attack on Putin’s home “a fabrication.”
Six months later, it’s now an operation he boasts publicly about.
Nor has Putin forgotten.
At an otherwise mundane press conference last week, Putin was asked about the headline-for-a-day that a drone had crashed on the roof of an apartment building in Romania. No one was seriously hurt. The drone was either Russian or Ukrainian and clearly had gone off course, but the event was instantly hyped as a possible Russian attack on our glorious NATO ally Romania!
The New York Times published a full article about this single drone that wandered out of a neighboring war zone. The Times said the drone crash “wounded two people” who had to be “admitted to hospital”. This was later described as a 53-year-old woman and a 14-year-old boy. The Times provides a link to a statement (in Romanian) that says the woman has first and second degree burns on her legs, and the boy unspecified burns on his forearms. So, minor burns. It must have been terrifying to have the roof of your apartment blasted open out of nowhere. That said, such minor injuries themselves would not usually merit “admission to hospital”. If, as an ER doctor, I tried to admit a case of first-degree forearm burns to Pediatrics anywhere in America, they’d have laughed me out of the building. Maybe they do things differently in Europe.
Although The New York Times was able to devote six reporters, a 30-second video, and more than 1,300 words across 26 paragraphs to this curiosity — “drone of uncertain provenance flies off course on May 29, hits roof of building, causes no major injuries” — it still has yet to mention the May 22 U.S.-backed Ukrainian drone attack on the teachers college at Starob*lsk that killed 21 Russian teenagers and injured, sometimes severely, more than 60.
But even more interesting (and pathetic, and illustrative) is the way The Times handles comments made by Putin about this Romanian drone kerfuffle.
After many paragraphs of emotive drama — a drone hit a building! Everyone was scared! — followed by repetitive insistence the drone had to be Russian, and that this was “Russia’s recklessness,” and that “Russia’s war of aggression has crossed yet another line” — The Times finally turned to the Russian reaction:
Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president, declined to take responsibility for the drone accident, suggesting that this could have been a stray Ukrainian drone.
“No one can speak of the origin of this aerial vehicle until it is fully examined,” he told a televised news conference in Kazakhstan. Russia would hold its own investigation if Romania would hand over the debris of the drone, he said.
But what Putin actually said was more interesting.
In a somewhat testy exchange with Russian reporters (a transcription and video are posted in English on the Kremlin website), he basically says it was clearly an accident; and the way to figure out whether it was a Russian or Ukrainian drone would be to examine the remnants of the drone itself.
As he made this glaringly obvious point, Putin then added a sarcastic fling at the West by recalling the attack of six months ago on his official residence in Valdai. He reminded listeners that, when the West expressed doubts that his home and family had just been targeted, Russia had replied by offering up the remnants of one of the downed drones, in a formal ceremony of hand-off to American diplomats:
“If they provide us with objective data [about this Romanian drone] — as we once did with representatives of the U.S. administration, by handing over information and drone fragments from an attempted strike on one of the residences of the President of the Russian Federation to be examined — then … we will conduct an objective investigation. Only then will we be in a position to assess what has actually happened.”
How interesting that The New York Times team edited out any reference to Putin’s reminder that we’d recently tried to assassinate him.
Apparently it still bugs Putin.
But The Times doesn’t thinks that’s news you need. You’ll have to do without the reminder that we probably tried to kill Putin and his wife and two kids, as you struggle to decide how much longer, as a U.S. citizen and voter, you want to spend billions of dollars on weapons to blow apart not just the Donbas, but now even Moscow and St. Petersburg, all while you yourself are targeted by city-vaporizing Russian missiles that could be here within 15 minutes. Good luck!
In summary: In recent days both Zelensky and Putin have again referenced an attack on Putin’s home and family carried out by U.S.-supported Ukrainian drones. This is the same attack that Trump initially believed in but then scoffed at, after the CIA formally told him it never happened.
But it clearly did happen.
Which suggests that the CIA is giving false briefings to the president.
Is anyone in Congress or major media ever going to ask the CIA or the so-called “community” of intelligence services about this? For example, was this an American-approved assassination attempt, or a rogue Ukrainian operation? If a rogue Ukrainian operation, did it still have U.S. logistics and targeting support?
Remember, Trump has long wanted to end the Ukraine war, at least in theory. But many in Western security state circles want to fight on to the last Ukrainian. The attack on Putin’s home in Valdai this winter came exactly as Trump and Zelensky were meeting in Florida to talk about peace, and the attack itself was seen by some as an attempt to derail those negotiations. Maybe it was.
And maybe, if a U.S.-Ukrainian drone attack had killed Putin’s sons, then today we’d all be wondering how we’d ever been so irresponsible, and asking why we’d ever let things escalate so horrifically.
Re "Were the Russians making this whole thing up?"
That's the key question. And based on this article, I'm sorry, but we still don't know. It's possible that Ukraine attacked the residence with CIA help. It's possible that there was an attack from other actors with Zelezney wanting to claim it for propaganda reasons. It's also possible that it was useful propaganda for Russia to make that claim, and for Putin to stick by the official propaganda later.
And if WSJ decided to omit that excerpt from Putin in the quote, I can think of a much simpler reason to do it than covering things up - it is a side-quest from what the article is trying to cover. If they included it, they'd need to spend some word count on explaining the background of this other claim from Putin, which is still heavily disputed. If there isn't new evidence to bring clarity to that claim, maybe it's not worth bringing into the content of the WSJ article. I'd prefer they left it in, but the omission doesn't in itself signal that the original claim has more credibility.
To the writer, this article passes through me without influencing me toward one conclusion or another. It just remains speculation.
Trump is being manipulated!