Who exactly flew two drones over the Kremlin at around 3am on Wednesday is likely to be one of many questions that will remain unanswered until the Ukraine war ends, if not some while after that.
But it is curious how many want to speculate about a Kremlin false-flag operation given how embarrassing it is to see video footage of drones flying over the Senate dome, housing Vladimir Putin’s presidential offices, before they were blown up.
Nor is it obvious that Russia needs an excuse for escalating the war, when it has ratcheted up its bombing in the last week amid fears that Ukraine’s air defences are running low. Twenty-three civilians were killed in the Kherson region on Wednesday; the same number died after cruise missiles hit a tower block in Uman the Friday before.
Even Margarita Simonyan, the head of the broadcaster RT, no stranger to demanding that Russia bomb the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in his palace, expressed reservations. If it was “a cunning plan by Moscow,” she said, “the situation would look very different by now”.
Instead civilian drone flights have been banned by dozens of Russian regions and GPS is being jammed in Moscow. On ride-hailing apps, taxis appear to be in the river – a response that suggests panic and a tightening of electronic security, rather than a planned escalation.
Consider the more plausible alternative. Ukraine, and partisan groups aligned to it, have been building up their capabilities throughout the war. Drone attacks inside Russia – sometimes at great distances – are nothing new.
In February, a Ukrainian drone attempted to strike a gas facility 50 miles south-east of Moscow, Russia said, with pictures of a downed UJ-22 drone to prove the point. The make is important – a light fixed-wing drone, of the type that can be seen flying towards the Kremlin in the second attack.
One video of the Kremlin incident shows a fixed-wing drone coming in from the left before it is blown up. The explosion is small, suggesting it was not armed. Two people are climbing the dome and do not appear to be affected by the detonation. So in no sense can it be thought of as an assassination attempt aimed at Putin.
Samuel Bendett, a drone specialist at the US Center for Naval Analyses, suggested the drone was either a Ukrainian made UJ-22 or a Chinese Mugin-5. The latter is available online for £7,500, a price well within the range of a guerrilla group, as well as a state actor, and a notch above a simple quadcopter.
Fixed-wing drones can fly hundreds of miles on a preset course, going low to avoid detection, and are made from composite materials that are not always easy to pick up on radar. Both the UJ-22 and Mugin-5 claim cruising speeds of 75mph and a flying time of seven hours – and parts of Ukraine are less than 300 miles (480km) from Moscow.
However, Ukrainian sources close to the partisan operations say they believe the drones were piloted remotely, not on a preset course. This means they would have been controlled from a secret location inside Russia itself, perhaps a few dozen miles from the capital, navigating using the ground to try to evade jamming.
If true, that would be risky, but it would give a greater degree of control to those running the mission and the Kremlin is an identifiable enough landmark to anybody who has studied the view from above. Some Russian bloggers speculate that the drones came in from the east, giving extra credence to the theory.
What is remarkable, though, is that Russia did not have the air defences or the jamming systems to prevent the drone getting so close. Or spot it from further out: Heathrow airport claims to have anti-drone technology that can detect an incoming small craft from 3 miles away, according to its manufacturers.
Kyiv is full of drone companies quietly designing and operating armed and unarmed drones, which are critical in giving Ukraine’s military an edge in the 15-month war. Long-range drone attacks on places such as the Engels airbase in Saratov or Sevastopol naval base in Crimea are nothing new. Live video even emerged after a raid on the latter.
What is murky is whether Ukraine’s political leadership organises such attacks, encourages them to go on deniably, or a pro-Ukrainian group is out of control. On Thursday, Zelenskiy said: “We don’t attack Putin.”
However, leaked Pentagon papers, based on electronic eavesdropping, say that in late February the Ukrainian president wanted to strike “deployment locations” in Russia’s Rostov province using drones. That may not be exactly the same as flying drones over the Kremlin, but the incident mirrors Kyiv’s wartime playbook better than a Russian conspiracy.
