A quick housekeeping note from last night’s second post: thank you all for the kind words and well wishes. As I wrote in a comment, the point of the personal anecdote was to drive the point home that Jordan Neely shouldn’t be dead because he had a bad day and he was not fortunate enough, as I am, to have people to support him. Especially as the institutions that should have failed him. There’s one additional point: that no one seems to have done anything to help him and everyone just made videos and took pictures and watched him be murdered is perhaps one of the cruelest parts of this tragedy.
President Zelenskyy is traveling again today and while there is a video of his joint press conference, there is not a daily address. I’ll have the video of the press conference with the write up from the presidential website after the jump.
Before we get to the newer information about last night’s drone strikes, earlier today Ukrainian air defense had to bring down one of their own Bayrakter Tb2s over Kyiv as it had malfunctioned and was out of control.
Update: Now confirmed with two Ukrainian sources with direct knowledge plus Ukraine's Air Force statement: Drone shot down over Kyiv today was a Ukrainian Bayraktar TB2 that was out of control due to technical reasons. @FThttps://t.co/gLhVnR6N6Z https://t.co/MwIiswQb1G
— Christopher Miller (@ChristopherJM) May 4, 2023
Here’s a machine translation from the post explaining the intercept on the Ukrainian Air Force’s Facebook page:
On May 4, around 8 p.m., a Bayraktar TB2 UAV lost control during a scheduled flight in the Kyiv region.
Since the uncontrolled presence of the UAV in the sky of the capital could have led to undesirable consequences, it was decided to use mobile fire teams.
The target was destroyed!
It’s a pity, but this is technology, and such cases do happen.It was probably a technical malfunction, and the cause is being investigated.
There were no casualties or injuries as a result of the combat operation and the fall of the UAV wreckage.
We don’t really know a whole lot more tonight than we did last night about the attempted drone attack on the Kremlin. The Financial Times has some of the details:
The US has accused Russia of “lying” after it claimed Washington was behind a drone attack on the Kremlin this week, raising tensions ahead of an expected Ukrainian counter-offensive against Russian forces.
Russia also launched its own drones at Ukrainian cities overnight following the incident in Moscow in the early hours of Wednesday, which the Kremlin called a Ukrainian attempt to assassinate President Vladimir Putin.
Multiple explosions rocked Kyiv later on Thursday, with machine gun fire also heard, indicating Ukraine’s forces were firing skywards to intercept incoming drones. There were no immediate reports of casualties or damage.
White House national security spokesperson John Kirby said: “There was no involvement by the United States in [the Kremlin incident]. Whatever it was did not involve us . . . We had nothing to do with this.”
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has also strongly rejected any suggestion of involvement in the attack, in which Russia said it shot down two drones over a Kremlin building in the early hours of Wednesday morning, briefly causing some roofing to catch fire.
Military analysts in Moscow also suggested that a non-state group could be behind the attempt, using commercially available drones.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov on Thursday said Russia saw the assault as a Ukrainian attack “dictated from across the ocean”.
“These decisions, the determination of targets, the determination of means, all of that is dictated to Kyiv from Washington. We are well aware of this,” Peskov told journalists.
“It is important that Washington clearly understands that we know this,” he added, “and that it understands how dangerous such direct involvement is in the conflict.”
Kirby said the statements were “false” and Peskov “is just lying”.
Alongside Ukraine’s president, a host of senior officials have also denied that Ukraine was behind the alleged attack on Moscow’s symbolic seat of power.
The Kremlin has said Putin was not in the building at the time. Asked about his reaction, Peskov presented the Russian leader as unperturbed and said the damage to the building was slight. “There are two burnt copper sheets that cover the dome, they will be replaced, if they have not already been replaced . . . There is no other damage.”
Western governments have declined to assign responsibility for the incident. A White House spokesperson on Wednesday said Russia had a history of “false flag” operations designed to discredit the enemy. She said the US had not encouraged or helped Ukraine to strike outside its own borders.
Much more at the link!
I think we can reasonably conclude, given all the other drone strikes in Russia over the past couple of days, that this was a Ukrainian strike. We know they can go deep enough to hit the Engels air bases. As such I think the first possibility from last night was the right one. This was a Ukrainian strike, it wasn’t meant to assassinate Putin, but to demonstrate that Ukraine could reach out and touch Moscow if it wanted to. And that regardless of who did it or the purpose of the strike, the Russians were and are going to continue to milk it for all its worth in terms of agitprop.
This is a measure of success:
Looks like Russian authorities are so afraid of renewed drone attacks in Moscow that they are spoofing/jamming the GPS navigation signal. Muscovites can no longer order cabs. https://t.co/mt4BqZXG2y pic.twitter.com/BNefAWFdwD
— Yaroslav Trofimov (@yarotrof) May 4, 2023
I’m going to put the jump in here and then pick back up with more on the attempted strike on the Kremlin:
War for Ukraine Day 435: A Brief Update to Update Everyone on the Drone StrikePost + Comments (61)