I have looked at the video several times and, I have seen dozens of Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian troops and material, and this strikes me as weird. The drone is seen clearly but it does not strike the Kremlin itself. I know they carry explosives but if that is a missile that too is weird to my eyes. The explosion happens when the drone clearly has passed by and does not appear to have done any damage. PURE SPECULATION on my part here: the Russian military fixed a weak explosive on the dome of the Kremlin and flew a drone over it, detonating the explosive a millisecond too late.
Okay, whatever. The reactions by the Putin regime and by President Zelensky's government are both weird, however.
Whatever the provenance of the explosions, it was clear that the Kremlin had made a deliberate choice to publicize the incident. About 12 hours after the blasts, Mr. Putin’s press service issued a rare, five-paragraph statement alleging that the “Kyiv regime” had used drones to carry out an unsuccessful “attempt on the life of the president.”
I really give Ukraine's military more credit than that. They do know how to do assassinations and this is preposterous as assassination attempt. For one thing, it's 535 miles from Kyiv to Moscow, which seems a long range for a drone. For another, it did no damage, not even penetrating the dome. For a third, Putin wasn't there. It was 2:30 a.m. Moscow time. What, did they expect him to be sleeping not only in the Kremlin but in a loft right under the dome?
If the explosions were indeed a drone attack, the penetration of central Moscow’s air defenses would represent the latest embarrassing failure by a Russian military that has struggled throughout the 14-month war. Either way, the incident could serve as a pretext for Mr. Putin to launch new strikes on Ukraine, as happened after the fiery attack on Russia’s bridge to Crimea last October.
And Zelensky's reaction was unusual:
Ukraine, for its part, has largely maintained a policy of deliberate ambiguity over whether it has played a role in attacks inside Russia. In this case, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, directly denied responsibility.
“We don’t attack Putin or Moscow,” he told the Nordic broadcaster TV2 during a visit to Finland. “We fight on our territory. We’re defending our villages and cities. We don’t have enough weapons for these.”
That last is consistent with the facts as I understand them.