The Russian state would like the world to believe it is yet again the victim. This time, two amateur drones flying close to the Kremlin were part of a nefarious Ukrainian plot to kill President Putin.That is what the official press service of Mr. Putin said in a statement released Wednesday after video of the aerial interception of the drones went viral.It was reminiscent of Russia’s initial claims at the beginning of its offensive war last year against Ukraine. As Russian forces began an ill-fated attack on Kiev, Moscow’s ambassador at the United Nations insisted his country was engaged only in a minor border skirmish.The point here is that Mr. Putin’s regime has a long track record of lying in order to justify its aggression. It has become a pattern. During Russia’s siege of Aleppo, Syria — when its aircraft bombed humanitarian convoys — Russia’s foreign ministry insisted that the rebels, who lacked the means of such an attack, were responsible.The claim that Ukraine attempted an assassination of Mr. Putin is particularly laughable. To start, the two drones that were shot down over the Kremlin did not resemble the military drones in Ukraine’s arsenal. The drones shot over the Kremlin had a shorter range, meaning they almost certainly had to have been launched within Russian territory. Also, the drones themselves were not large enough to carry enough of a payload to damage the Kremlin itself, let alone anyone inside. Finally, the Ukrainians like the rest of the world know that Mr. Putin is rarely at the Kremlin and holds most of his meetings at his personal residences, which are better fortified. This is why, for now, it’s best to believe Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky. In Finland Wednesday, he denied Ukraine launched the attack.The president and chief executive of the Center for European Policy Analysis, Alina Polyakova, told me on Wednesday that her staff had noticed reports from Russia in the last three months of drones falling out of the sky in and around Moscow. That is one possibility of what happened. That this was just a random event and not an attempted assassination. Ms. Polyakova said if this was planned as a Russian false-flag operation — an attack carried out by Moscow but intended to look like it came from Kyiv — there would have been more messaging from state-aligned press and senior Russian officials beforehand.“What normally happens when there is some sort of event that appears to be orchestrated by the Kremlin, it’s pre-baked,” Ms. Polyakova said. “The narrative is already spun up. They have said nothing about these other drones. So to me this looks like a scramble.”
