Episode Info
- Season15
Hosted by Christina Ruffini and Sir Richard Dearlove
Guest
Episode Summary
The United States and Ukraine have strongly denied any involvement in an alleged drone assassination attempt against Vladimir Putin this week. According to Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov, two drones were reportedly downed by Russian air defences above the Kremlin, the fortress which is the heart of the government. One Decision’s Julia Macfarlane and Sir Richard Dearlove analyze the incident, the possibility it could be a false flag operation by Russia to escalate the war, and how Moscow could retaliate against Kyiv.
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Transcript
INTRODUCTION
Mcfarlane: You're listening to One More Decision, an update from me, Julia McFarlane, and the One Decision team in London, Washington, and LA examining the choices today that shape our world. On Tuesday, according to Putin's spokesman, two drones were reportedly downed by Russian air defenses in Moscow, just meters above the Kremlin, the fortress, which is the heart of the Russian government. President Putin, who was not there at the time, was obviously unharmed. Footage emerged on social media showing smoke rising from the Kremlin. Now days later, Dmitry Peskov, Putin's spokesman, said that the US had undoubtedly masterminded the attack. In the initial aftermath, Moscow had blamed the Ukrainian leadership. President Zelenskyy was, at the time, on a visit abroad to Finland discussing his country's possible NATO membership. He, on behalf of the Ukrainian government, denied any Ukrainian involvement. As for Washington's reaction to Russian claims that it masterminded the attack, John Kirby, the national security spokesman, dismissed the suggestion, saying Peskov is just lying there, pure and simple.
Kirby: I would just tell you mister Peskov's lying. I mean, that's obviously it's a ludicrous claim. The United States had nothing to do with this. We don't even know exactly what happened here.
Mcfarlane: I should note the footage that has been circulated, apparently showing the incident in the night sky above the Kremlin's turrets on Tuesday, has not been verified, and Russian state media have avoided using it in their reports. They've used file footage to illustrate news reports on Moscow's claims. They've also aired the threat issued from Putin's office that Moscow reserves the right to retaliate when and where it considered necessary. My cohost, sir Richard Dearlove, the former chief of MI6, has just returned to the UK from a special visit to Kyiv, having been invited to meet with senior security and government officials in the Ukrainian capital to discuss the war effort, what Kyiv needed from its allies, and, well, he wasn't at liberty to say much else. Old habits die hard, but he was willing to chat through with me his thoughts on this alleged assassination attempt in Moscow.
ANALYSIS WITH SIR RICHARD DEARLOVE
Dearlove: Well, watched the footage carefully several times, and my immediate reaction seeing something like that is it's a montage. But this is a highly speculative comment. It somehow doesn't really look real. And come on, mean, flying a drone at the Kremlin in inverted commas to assassinate Putin doesn't add up, you know, when he's if if he were there, he'd be in this, you know, relatively secure place. I I mean, it looks to me as though this is a montage to escalate an attack on Kyiv and would, you know, maybe give the Russians so called excuse for bombing the city or bombing, you know, the government quarter in Kyiv. I can't really think of any other explanation. I mean, some people have already come up with some weird stuff like saying, you know, it's rogue Russian opposition, and a demonstration that, you know, that they can get inside the Kremlin. There are all sorts of theories flying around. But, you know, let's think about this rationally. Kyiv manages to shoot down now pretty much anything that is fired at them around the city, you know, whether it's a drone or a cruise missile or one of those Iranian drones. So their air defense is pretty efficient. The Kremlin must be one of the most heavily protected sites from aircraft attack anywhere in the world. So I'm left scratching my head.
Mcfarlane: That's true. And it begs a question as to how a drone managed to make it as far as on top of the Kremlin building itself. There have been some people who've said that were trying to sort of pass this bizarre incident saying that this is weird because this is an embarrassing thing for the Russians to admit. Obviously, they said, you know, Putin wasn't harmed. He wasn't even there. But a lot of people have stated that Putin doesn't stay over at the Kremlin. It's his office. It's not where he spends his evenings. It's certainly not where he spends his nights, and it was an odd time of day for any assassination attempt on Putin's life. The the fact that it occurred at a time of day where Putin is not expected to be at the Kremlin. And secondly, it was a drone, and it wasn't as far as we can tell. And, of course, going by this this dodgy footage, it it certainly would not be anything with the capability of carrying a payload needed to take out, you know, a room in the Kremlin? And also, as you say, it's heavily fortified. The security is is so tight. How did all the CCTV cameras around Red Square how did they not see this thing coming from such a distance? I mean, the whole thing is weird, isn't it? It's very weird. It puts me in mind of that kid who flew a light aircraft during the cold war. Do you remember? And landed it in Red Square.
Dearlove: It's a bit before my time, Richard. When he flew under, you know, a single engine plane, he must have flown at very low altitude under all the air defenses and warning systems and actually landed the plane in Red Square and probably got arrested. Look, there's something very, very odd about this indeed. If you look at the footage, it looks more like something from a large firework display rather than a lethal drone. You're quite right, you know, to have a small explosive warhead. Was it flown from close by? Was it a big drone with a petrol engine, long distance, flown from Ukrainian territory, that didn't look like it, it's too small? Oh, gosh. You can go on and on saying, what on earth it is. I think if it's a montage, it's a strange way of, as it were, doing it because it puts a big question mark around the whole air defense system that the Russians have to protect the Kremlin. So I mean, I'm left scratching my head. I think if I had to choose, would say it's a neat way of Russia being able to escalate their attacks on Kyiv and perhaps use, you know, some supersonic bomber to drop a very large bomb on the government quarter saying this is in revenge for having a go. But I'm sure that as this has happened, Zelenskyy will be given appropriate protection and he won't be in Kyiv anyway. He'll be somewhere else in some secret bunker.
Mcfarlane: That's interesting. I mean, the obvious question is, does Russia really need a pretext to escalate? They have been doing pretty much what they want. I wanna just take us to how president Zelenskyy handled it. He was in Finland at the time. He was talking, to the Finnish government about them, supporting Ukraine's bid to join NATO. He then went on an unannounced visit, to The Netherlands shortly after. The Ukrainian government immediately didn't respond when the allegation from the Russians first came out the day that that this all came about. And then later on, Zelenskyy responded on camera.
Zelenskyy: We don't attack Putin or Moscow. We fight on on our territory. We are defending our villages and cities. We don't have, you know, enough weapon for this. That's why we don't use it any anywhere. For for us, that is the deficit. We we can't spend it.
Mcfarlane: Now that's not entirely true, though, because we do know that the Ukrainians have carried out drone attacks before on Russian actual sovereign territory. That's not not not to say, you know, the areas of occupied Eastern Ukraine, which Russia considers as its own sovereign territory. They now see as as part of Russia, and they have, of course, used attacks on the Donbas, claiming that it's an attack on Russian sovereign territory, and they reserve the right to escalate accordingly. So it's kind of hard to know exactly what happened taking the Ukrainian response because as you've noted before in this podcast, the Ukrainians have been duplicitous at times. They have been quite deceitful. They have briefed that they were going to advance in one area, and they've actually gone the other. They've been quite judicious in what they say in public and what they end up doing. So, I mean, what did you make of how the Ukrainians handled this this allegation?
Dearlove: Yeah. Well, I think Zelenskyy is very good at keeping with these sorts of incident in the public domain, and he issues, of course, of what sounds like a convincing denial. And I wouldn't expect anything else. But, you know, we we do know that the Ukrainians have probably, we don't have proof, carried out attacks on fuel and military depots, which are actually in Russian territory. And there's recently a couple of trains blown up near the Ukrainian border, but definitely on the Russian or the Belorussian side. So, you know, is this Russian partisans who are sympathetic or Ukrainian Russians inside Russia? I'm sure that, you know, there are many explanations for these incidents, and I don't think that the Ukrainians are idle. You know, they're they're going to go on the front foot and press their capability as far as possible without an obvious escalation. It just seems to me that carrying out a drone attack on the Kremlin seems pretty unlikely, but not impossible. I mean, there was that bomb attack. There've been a couple of assassinations which look as though they may have been carried out by the Ukrainians. I do think this drone attack is very odd. It looks very odd. It looks very staged. And I would say I don't think it's what the Russians are alleging it to be. It's something else. But what else? There are about four or five possible explanations, and I think we've probably covered those.
Mcfarlane: Yeah. Well, I mean, the other thing is a lot of people, including I've noticed some former colleagues of yours, sir Richard, have said that they think the most likely explanation is a what's known as a false flag attack. And a few people have noted that Putin has form for this. And so I just wanted to mention the Russian apartment bombings that took place in Moscow and Volgodonsk. It was the events that basically triggered the second Chechen war, and these were a series of bombings that occurred when Vladimir Putin was newly in power. And it it transpired after the fact that Russian intelligence operatives had been seen in these buildings. There was evidence that there was Russian security forces in these buildings. And now the widely assessed history is that this was Vladimir Putin's first false flag attack on Russian soil, on his own people, in order to for him to use as a pretext for going to war. Now people have been bringing up these apartment bombings, to show that Putin has form for this kind of sabotage, this kind of false flag incident. Those apartment bombings took place in 1999. What were you up to back then? And and tell me your view of of that incident, what it told you at the time of Vladimir Putin, and if it is an event that tells us about how the man operates still today.
Dearlove: I must say at the time, and, you know, this is in the early years of Putin being in power, I was of the view then that I didn't or wouldn't have expected him to go to those extremes. I know after the event there's been a huge amount of analysis and speculation, and a lot of Russians themselves have alleged that the attack was by the FSB. I'm still left puzzled by those events because at the time, it it it it's hard to work out what the motivation would have been and and and why Putin would have authorized it. I'm not seeking to exculpate him. And I thought it was such an extreme action to take, but maybe, you know, we've learned a lot more about Putin since then, and maybe there's this element of extremism in his character. He's certainly shown it in relation to what the Chechen War was subsequently like, the brutality of it. He certainly authorized great brutality or allowed his armies when they were in Syria. So there is a huge amount of, as it were, form there. It doesn't look as though there are many restraints operating in their minds when it comes to the morals of how they're prepared to behave in what they consider a state of war. So I think anything is really possible. But if you go back to that event in 1999, I I was very skeptical at the time, but I know more materials emerged since then, and and it does look suspicious now.
Mcfarlane: What do you think is gonna be going through president Zelenskyy's mind given that the Russians are now claiming that there's been an attack attempting, to take out their president? Do you think he is going to be a bit ginger about going back to Kyiv knowing that the Russians have said they reserve the right to try and put a hit on him?
Dearlove: Well, don't think anything's really materially changed as far as Zelenskyy is concerned because the original invasion we know that there was a group of special forces, led by that character Kadyrov, and their instructions were to go and murder Zelenskyy, you know, in the early days. So you know when they went down the road into Kyiv they certainly weren't going to spare Zelenskyy and the government, and most of them probably would have been shot and killed.
Mcfarlane: Yeah. I mean all that stuff about wanting to decapitate the Kyiv regime, and as you said we had those reports of these death squads roaming the streets of Kyiv trying to take out Zelenskyy. We you're right, but we haven't heard much about that since then. Why why do you think that is?
Dearlove: Because their special forces have been repulsed, you know, and they're sitting, you know, behind the border, and the Ukrainian military and the Ukrainian special forces have got the better of them and sent them running. So, you know, unless they can infiltrate an assassin and I mean having spent three days in Kyiv and seen how tight security is, I mean, it's really, really tight around the government quarter. And I would have thought the chances of the Russians being able to achieve anything which makes me think that the only option is some sort of rather excessive bombing raid, which would be designed to knock out the government quarter, which would be a huge step for the Russians to take, but you never know.
Mcfarlane: I mean, that would be an extraordinary escalation, for the Russians to take? I mean, do you think we are at that stage?
Dearlove: Well, it's a possibility. I I I things are going badly. There's a symbolic date coming up, which is the May 9, which is a huge date in Russia, know, which just signals the end of World War II and they always have this massive victory parade and parade their veterans. And if you go into the Soviet Ministry of Defense, they've got all these huge paintings with the surrender of German troops and their flags being laid down and it's all in Red Square. So the symbolism for the Russian postwar identity is crucially important. I think we're sitting on the risk of escalation, an important anniversary, an impending Ukrainian offensive, NATO summit, and there are all sorts of reasons why we might be reaching a point where the Russians are gonna do something desperate in their, you know, their spring offensive or their late winter, early spring offensive appears to have failed. In this informed talk in Washington of them having suffered 100,000 casualties, I mean, this is stunning. This is the figures are just unbelievable.
Mcfarlane: That's it from this world update from the One Decision podcast. If you enjoyed this little conversation, why not check out our channel for our main offerings which drop every Thursday? Just search One Decision wherever you find your podcasts. From me and the team, thank you for listening, and see you next time.
