Don’t expect an end to sabotage and retribution during the war in Ukraine

Alongside the fighting on the frontlines there have been clandestine campaigns against both infrastructure and people, writes Kim Sengupta

Alleged drones around the Kremlin are the latest incident to have Moscow and Kyiv trading recriminations (via REUTERS)

Ukraine’s “attempt to assassinate Vladimir Putin” in the early hours of Wednesday was followed by a barrage of Russian strikes on Thursday. Some of the missiles that landed in Odessa were inscribed “For the Kremlin” and “For Moscow”.

What unfolded was in line with the two opposing narratives from Moscow and Kyiv – that Ukraine tried to kill the Russian president in the Kremlin using drones; or that it was a false flag operation by the Russians to justify another round of assaults on civilian infrastructure in Ukraine.

Russia has accused the US of being the real architect of the Moscow raid. Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesperson, said: “We are well aware that decisions on such actions, on such terrorist attacks, are not made in Kyiv, but in Washington, and Kyiv is doing what it is told to do. It is very important that in Washington they understand that we know this, and understand how dangerous such direct participation in the conflict is.”

The US has denied any involvement and John Kirby, the White House National Security spokesperson, accused Peskov of lying.

Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president and current deputy chairman of the country’s security council, says he remains convinced of Kyiv’s culpability and has declared that nothing short of personal retribution will suffice following the Kremlin incident. “After today's terrorist act, no variant remains other than the physical elimination of [Volodymyr] Zelensky and his clique,” he said.

However, a number of attempts have already been made to eliminate President Zelensky, according to the Ukrainian government. Chechen death squads sent to Kyiv in the early days of the war, they said, and carried out three attempts on his life.

Reporting from Kyiv at the time, we were shown dead bodies which were supposedly of the Chechen assassins. They had been, according to Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council, intercepted and dealt with thanks to information received from Russian intelligence (FSB).

“We are well aware of the special operation that was to take place directly by the Kadyrovites [special forces of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov] to eliminate our president. And I can say that we have received information from the FSB, who… do not want to take part in this bloody war. And thanks to this, the Kadyrov elite group was destroyed, which came here to eliminate our president," he said.

Danilov might have been attempting to sow division between Russia and its ally. However, Kadyrov, who has become highly critical of the performance of the Russian military in the war, volunteered at one point that some of his men had been killed in operations around Kyiv when it was not publicly known that they were there.

A month later, Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the Ukrainian president, said: "Our foreign partners are talking about two or three attempts. I believe that there were more than a dozen such attempts”.

British, US and other Western intelligence agencies had, in the early months of the war, advised Zelensky to stay away from certain areas, but it is not known whether this was due to any specific assassination threats. The US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in an interview with CBS, said that the Ukrainian government had prepared for Zelensky’s potential death, but refused to disclose any details.

Russia has provided no proof that Ukraine had attempted to kill the Russian president in this week’s attack. However, what happened is a highly embarrassing failure of security in the heart of the country’s political and security establishment, and that is the reason for some to believe that the whole thing had not been staged by Moscow.

“If enemy drones reach the Kremlin, it means that any other object on the territory of the European part of Russia is generally defenceless," said Abbas Gallyamov, a former Putin speechwriter who now lives abroad. "Therefore, I do not believe that this was a provocation conceived by the Kremlin in order to influence public opinion.”

The Ukrainian government has firmly refuted that it was responsible for the Kremlin drones. "We don't attack Putin or Moscow. We fight on our territory. We are defending our villages and cities," insisted President Zelensky on a visit to Finland.

But is this true? Among Pentagon documents leaked by National Guard, airman Jack Teixeira last month was a CIA classified report which stated that Ukrainian military intelligence (HRU) “had agreed, at Washington’s request, to postpone strikes” on Moscow in the run-up to the first anniversary of the war in February.

The report added, however, that “there’s no indication” that SBU, Ukraine’s security agency also “agreed to postpone its own plans to attack Moscow around the same date”. A week after the anniversary, the Kremlin accused Kyiv of attempting drone strikes on infrastructure near Moscow.

There have been a remarkable number of blasts, many involving drones and other sabotage, inside Russia before and since then. Russia's foreign ministry accused Ukraine on Thursday of committing "terrorist and sabotage activities" with "unprecedented momentum". Ukrainians certainly believe that their forces are successfully taking the war to Russia. Stores sell T-shirts with images of cotton flowers blooming on walls of the Kremlin – “bavovna” or “ cotton” being the name given to smoke billowing from the strikes.

On the same day as this week’s Kremlin attack, another apparent drone strike took place against a fuel storage facility near the port of Taman, with one of the aircraft crashing near Kolomna in the Moscow oblast. Another drone was shot down over Feodosia in Crimea. An oil depot – also in Crimea – was hit at the weekend.

Two trains were derailed with the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) on Monday and Tuesday this week in the Bryansk region of Russia, near Belarus, and power lines were blown up a few days earlier near St Petersburg. Oil facilities, sending fuel to Europe, were also hit at Bryansk. “Ukraine Weapons Tracker”, a Twitter account that posts details of attacks from both sides, said it received "reliable" information that the Bryansk blasts were the result of attacks by Ukraine’s Turkish-made Bayraktar drones.

On 21 April, a blaze at the Central Research Institute of the Aerospace Defence Forces at Tver, northwest of Moscow, led to a number of deaths. Hours later, in Kineshma, northeast of Moscow, there was another blaze at the largest manufacturer of chemical solvents in the country. The Dmitrievsky chemical plant lies a thousand kilometres from the Ukrainian border.

In December, Engels airbase in Saratov and Dyagilevo airbase in Ryazan came under drone attack. Zelensky’s advisor Podolyak tweeted at the time: “The earth is round, discovery made by Galileo. if something is launched into other countries’ airspace, sooner or later unknown flying objects will return to departure point.”

There have been numerous attacks inside Russian occupied territories, some blamed on internecine struggles between various separatist groups and Russian intelligence. But Ukraine has been carrying out sabotage and retribution missions inside occupied territories. Those deemed guilty of treachery have been shot, stabbed, blown up, poisoned and hanged, illustrating the ruthless and lethal determination of those hunting them down – Ukrainian intelligence officials working with partisans, according to various accounts.

A recent target, police chief Oleksandr Mishchenko, was killed in an explosion in Melitopol, in Zaporizhzhia Oblast on 27 April. Others targeted have included: Dmytro Savluchenko, an official of the Nova Rus youth organisation in Kherson, who died after his car was blown up; Volodymyr Saldo, head of the occupation administration in Kherson, who was allegedly poisoned by his personal chef but survived; Vitaly Gura, the deputy mayor of Nova Kakhova, who was reportedly shot dead; Aleksander Kolesnikov, the deputy head of traffic police in Berdyansk, who was killed in a blast; Ivan Sushko, the mayor of Mykhaylivka, in the Zaporizhzhya region, who was killed by a car bomb; Artem Bardin, the military commander of Berdyansk, who died after his booby-trapped car exploded in an administrative building, severing his legs and Olena Shapurova, the education chief in Melitopol, who was injured in a car bombing.

There have also been deaths inside Russia. Western officials believe that Ukraine sanctioned the assassination of Darya Dugina, a Kremlin-supporting journalist and the daughter of Alexander Dugin, a Russian nationalist ideologue.

Dugina was killed near Moscow in August by a bomb planted in a Toyota Land Cruiser belonging to her father, who may have been the real target. The US Treasury had sanctioned Dugina four months before her killing because of her part in a disinformation operation carried out by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a long-term Putin ally and the founder of the Wagner Group whose mercenaries are fighting in Ukraine.

Podolyak has denied Ukraine’s government was involved in any way. “Before Dugina’s murder, the people of Ukraine and representatives of the Ukrainian authorities did not know about her public activities and her influence on propaganda programmes,” he said. He did not go into his government’s view of her father’s activities.

In April, the influential military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky – whose real name was Maxim Fomin – was killed by a bomb as he was hosting a talk with other pro-war commentators at a café in in St Petersburg. Darya Trepova, a 26-year-old woman, has been charged with committing “a terrorist act by an organised group that caused intentional death”. Russian authorities said she had acted under instructions from people working on behalf of Ukraine.

Tatarsky had close links with Prigozhin. He had also published some highly critical pieces about the Russian military hierarchy. Senior officials in Kyiv maintain that Ukraine has not gained anything from his death and the killing was the result of internecine strife among the Kremlin’s security apparatus.

What really happened with the drones in the night over the Kremlin is shrouded in secrets and lies. All the indications are that sabotage and sudden deaths in this clandestine war are set to continue.