Russian authorities are trying to downplay a series of drone attacks across Moscow, including on its most elite area, Rublyovka. The Kremlin has blamed Ukraine, although Kyiv has denied any involvement in the attacks – the first of this scale on Russian soil since it invaded Ukraine 15 months ago.
Russian media reports originally suggested as many as 30 drones targeted the city, and videos of (apparent) direct hits on buildings went viral. But soon Kremlin officials reclaimed the narrative. Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin claimed only eight drones had participated in the attack, and insisted any damage to buildings was caused by debris after they were shot down. Defence minister Sergei Shoigu, buoyed up by support from politicians and president Putin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, tried to distract from the embarrassment, citing the number of Ukrainian soldiers killed by Russian forces, and the Nato equipment Russia has purportedly destroyed.
But Russian social media paints events in a less stoical light. Although there is little sign of panic, the reaction to the drone attacks should not hearten the Kremlin or any Russians who mistakenly believed its claims that the war would not come to their homes. While this moment perhaps falls short of bringing a tideshift in attitudes, it does mark an important step farther down a path of societal cynicism towards the state’s ability to wage, or win, its war in Ukraine.
Most attention has been elicited by the attacks on Rublyovka, a series of villages to the west of Moscow where Putin’s luxurious Novo-Ogaryovo state residence is located. Russia’s ruling classes, including the prime minister, live there in “cottages”, a word taken from the English but used here to describe gauche and gargantuan mansions. A video apparently showing a drone hitting one such turreted pink “cottage” has been shared widely on Telegram.
The location is significant. Rublyovka has come to symbolise how out of touch Russia’s political classes are with real life and the country’s many troubles. Speaking last week, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, mentioned these tensions, arguing that Russia’s decision-making elites live in a fantasy world where the war doesn’t affect them – and that that needs to change for victory over Ukraine.
Naturally, such coincidences raise the temptation of conspiratorial thinking – could Russia have attacked itself? After all, since war broke out on 24 February 2022, it is no longer possible to say that Putin, or the Kremlin, would never do that. But there is little reason for the authorities to stage such an embarrassing stunt, which they have gone to great lengths to downplay. For some Russians, “false-flag” claims are just another way to centre their own state’s power, and to deny Ukraine’s capabilities.
More classic conspiracy theories abound. Russian military bloggers supportive of the war blame the US, which they view as ultimately responsible.
Regardless of the plausibility of these different theories, Russian readiness to embrace conspiracy points to evidence of a growing anxiety among the general population and a sense among the political classes that Putin and his cronies are no longer able to control events.
Other social media users were dismissive of the attack, rightly claiming it wasn’t much compared with what Russians were doing to Ukraine, albeit said without any sympathy for the latter. But there is also growing cynicism and sarcasm at Russia’s insistence that the war “is all going to plan”, and increasing exasperation at the gap between hyperbolic rhetoric and the Kremlin’s inability to realise its militaristic ambitions.
The ongoing mockery of Kremlin propaganda lines should not be taken as evidence of dissidence or an appetite for liberal democracy; indeed, many such people approvingly cite Stalin as an example of a non-corrupt leader who had the moral vigour to do whatever it took. Instead, it is better understood as the natural consequence of Russia’s war against reality. It is one thing to deny objective notions of truth when they have no tangible meaning for you but quite another when this objective truth explodes over your mansion.
Tuesday’s drone attacks poke another hole in Russia’s aggrieved unreality – in which Red Army-heir Russian heroes are saving ordinary Russophile Ukrainians held hostage by CIA/British/gay parade-backed Nazis. This intense propaganda narrative, in place since 2014 and rooted in a worldview of Russia’s innate “great-powerness” and western malice, is not a cynical lie but something that Vladimir Putin appears to profess genuinely.
But you can’t resist reality forever: it has its way of making itself known, often in the least expected ways. It is there in the Russian recruitment ads, parroting second world war-parodic patriotism but ending crassly with lucrative offers of sign-up money. It is there when the Russian elite lambasts the west, but keeps their children and assets here. And it is there this week in the drone attacks on Moscow, and, most importantly of all, on Rublyovka.
Dr Jade McGlynn is a research fellow at King’s College London and the author of Russia’s War and Memory Makers: The Politics of the Past in Putin’s Russia
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