At this point in the Ukraine war, a drone attack could end Putin. Let us explain.
May 30, 2023 had all the ingredients to be a terrible, horrible, no good,
very bad day for Russian President Vladimir Putin–and he’s been having a lot of those lately.
Insulated from the horrors his regime have unleashed on Ukrainian civilians and soldiers
fighting for their very existence just across the border, on that day two people were injured
by a drone which penetrated the airspace over Moscow and careened into a wealthy residential
building. Two weeks earlier with air raid sirens wailing across the city,
two similarly unarmed drones exploded over the Kremlin just twenty-four hours ahead of Russia’s
Victory Day celebrations. The Russians were quick to blame these strikes on Kyiv–an attack,
they said, had been an assassination attempt on Putin himself. Yikes.
As expected, Russian officials are trying to downplay these attacks claiming they are
insignificant and doing everything they can to lull the Russian public back into
a false sense of safety and make sure they continue to support the war.
But could there be more to these attacks than meets the eye? Could these drone strikes,
along with the visible weakening of Putin’s hold on power that has
followed in their aftermath really be the beginning of the end for Putin’s regime?
Let’s find out.
There isn’t much we actually know about the drone attacks that hit Moscow. Reliable information,
as you might expect, has been scant, and there’s good reason for that. Putin’s grip on Russian
state censorship has grown tighter as his fortunes in Ukraine have flagged. Barring
another Discord leak to enlighten us, what we can reliably assess comes from reading between
the lines of Russian state media and combining that with evidence from social media footage,
open-source intelligence, official statements, and eyewitness accounts.
That said, here’s what we know:
On May 30, there were three confirmed drone strikes in Russia: One hit a residential
building on the outskirts of the city; a second struck a high-rise apartment block;
while a third smashed into another high-rise building. Other footage emerged showing a
drone against a bright blue sky streaking at low altitude over a wealthy Moscow suburb.
Not all eight drones which were fired at Moscow hit their targets. Five were
intercepted by Russian Pantsir air-defense batteries which,
fortunately for the city’s residents, had been installed earlier this year.
Soft-kill systems which target a drone’s delicate sensors, communications arrays,
and guidance and electronic systems were also employed and reportedly downed about three more.
It was not immediately clear who was responsible for these, the first successful drone assaults
on the Russian capital since the start of Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.
Security camera or eyewitness footage is often the best bet for drone experts to identify their
provenance. Footage from these attacks, however, seemed to beg more questions than clarify them.
One drone’s in-air outline was clearly visible in one of the videos which surfaced online;
perplexingly, it was not remotely the same as the UJ-22 drone in widespread Ukrainian
service–some of which were reported to have been used in the attack. Unlike the UJ-22,
which employs a traditional front mounted propeller, the drone which left experts
scratching their heads had canards and pusher propellers that made it
resemble something more akin to a hammerhead shark than anything we’d really seen before.
This unique design suggested that the drones in question could have been a
type of kamikaze drone known as the “Beaver” recently reported on in Ukraine. The Beaver
is a drone project initiated by a Ukrainian blogger who created five prototypes using
crowdsourced money for the Ukrainian Armed Forces. His drone does bear the same forward
canard wing configuration as the video, but the outline was still not a perfect match.
Other experts claim the attacks were made by “modernized A-2 Sinitsa drones” resembling
“an Israeli-made IAI HAROP barrage munition” which can allegedly fly up to 1,000 kilometers.
It would have to be heavily modified; the A-2 Sinitsa itself can only fly for around an hour,
meaning it would have had to be launched virtually from within Moscow itself.
What we can’t learn from the drone’s shape we can try to discern from its scale. According to
one American drone expert, the size of the drones–including those used to strike the
Kremlin in early May–showed they could fly “tens of kilometers,” if not “hundreds.” This would
seem to confirm military involvement in their conception–in other words, that they came from
across the border, in Ukraine, fired by someone associated with the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
But not necessarily. These May attacks were far from the only drone strikes since the start of
the calendar year. There have been more than sixty such strikes over the past six months,
most of them on military depots and airbases in the neighboring Crimean,
Belgorod, and Bryansk regions. Further inland, there have also been a series of drone strikes
against airbases in the Ryazan, Saratov, and Kursk regions. Multiple drone attacks
have been filmed on Russian ships moored in the Black Sea, as well as reports of attacks
on Russian pipelines and oil refineries near Novorossiysk, one of Russia’s biggest
oil export hub. All of these were military or military-adjacent targets–targets which could
directly be categorized as things sustaining or helping facilitate Russia’s ongoing war effort.
The attacks on Moscow were clearly different. Unlike the attacks in the military sphere, these
drones, which struck civilian targets, caused minor damage because all but one had been stripped
of their warheads. According to two Russian experts, rather than inflict heavy collateral
damage, the attacks “were meant to send a message that Ukraine–which has not claimed responsibility
for the strikes–has both the capacity and will to strike back at the capital of its enemy invader.”
Though it would enable Russian air defenses to more easily track their flight trajectory,
piloting the drones in broad daylight was therefore a conscious decision; even if Ukraine
refrained from applying deadly force–something it easily could have justified in honest retaliation
for the pain and suffering the Kremlin has inflicted–Kyiv wanted Russian residents to know
they were being attacked in broad daylight, when people were awake, and when it would be harder for
Russian state media to deny the scope of the attacks. It is part of an ongoing, gradually
escalatory “psychological campaign against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime.”
Where they hit was also not a mistake; the wealthy suburbs of Moscow are home to the
families of prominent oligarchs and political elites–Russia’s civilian upper-crust. These are
the key pillars of support for Putin’s regime. One U.S. official and a congressional staffer
mentioned that the attacks could even have been aimed “at what were believed to be the Moscow
residences of Russian intelligence officers.” Intelligence officials at Strider Technologies,
a Utah-based strategic intelligence startup, for example, have been able to establish a
connection between one of the buildings and the Russian SVR, or Foreign Intelligence Service.
The building, they claimed, “was owned by a Russian state budgetary organization,
which has held contracts with a military unit known to be a cover for the Foreign Intelligence
Service.” Strider Technologies’ Chief Operating Officer Eric Levesque dismissed the possibility
that this was a random attack on a haphazardly chosen civilian target. “The strike gets to the
heart of the psychological warfare elements of the Russia-Ukraine conflict,” he said,
“which for the first time is reaching Moscow neighborhoods.”
The attacks, therefore, were meant to sew doubt and discord among Putin’s followers
at a critical time. And in retrospect, the attack seemed incredibly well-timed:
We know the domestic situation in Russia is in dire straits. As major new developments like
Prigozhin’s abortive mercenary march on Moscow and abortive mutiny attest,
Putin may have thus far been able to retain his domestic stranglehold on power, but new challenges
are collectively revealing the extent of his control. It is a grip that is slowly weakening.
If the attacks were in fact staged by Kyiv–and it is extremely likely they were–they have been
extremely smart to keep their role in staging them relatively anonymous. President Zelensky
has billions of reasons to maintain his close friendships with the Western powers
which have thus far helped undergird Ukraine’s war effort. Fearing the escalatory crisis that
might rear its ugly head from an outright attack on Russian soil using Western-donated weapons,
the Biden administration in particular has counseled Zelensky and his military advisors
to refrain from using American-donated weapons on sabotage missions within
Russia itself. Biden’s staff is far from alone. Using homemade,
crowdsourced drones may have been Kyiv’s way of circumventing these fears. No matter what,
they will doggedly deny all responsibility or involvement in the attacks.
Behind the scenes, however, Ukraine is almost obligated to engage in this type
of full-spectrum warfare, especially now as the outcome of its counteroffensive hangs in
the balance. Any degree of chaos and instability it can engender in Russia–especially among its
political and military elite who are controlling the war–will reverberate
favorably as they refocus on the bloody task at hand–retaking lost territory.
With far more intelligence on what is going on inside Russia than we can ever hope to have,
Ukrainian officials may have read the tea leaves weeks in advance–dating back to the battle of
Bakhmut–that Prigozhin was unstable and that his relationship with Putin was on very thin ice.
But more likely than not, Ukraine will not have put all its eggs into one basket. While the Wagner
mutiny and the drone attacks before it were a pleasant distraction, the Ukrainians remain wholly
focused on the task at hand. One American, Ryan O’Leary, currently serving as a junior sergeant
in the Ukrainian military, remarked that he and his men found the drone attacks and subsequent
revolt “glorious,” and that even though it did not lead to the fracture of Putin’s cabinet,
the momentary seizure of Rostov on Don, the epicenter of Russia’s resupply, air, and command
capabilities in the southern region will cause a welcome level of disorder in the weeks to come as
“Russia struggles to bring supplies to bolster its front lines and its officers have to suss
out the allegiance of Wagner fighters now under the military’s command.” More problems, O’Leary
commented, would occur latently. “It’s just a matter of where and how long it takes to kick in.”
This may have been an observation based primarily on the recent Wagner coup attempt,
but it certainly carries over in its application to the May drone attacks. Their impact,
according to O’Leary’s line of thinking, will not be visibly apparent until well down the road when
their political, economic, psychological aftermath has been allowed to play out. Like the Wagner
insurrection, the drone attacks demonstrably illustrated Putin’s weakness. Retired General
Kenneth McKenzie, onetime leader of U.S. Central Command, observed that after the Wagner march,
Putin was “weaker today than he was 72 hours ago because the key to Putin’s survival is absolute
relentless control.” “That myth,” he continued, “has been punctured and you have that disarray at
the top, which I think makes him weak, vulnerable, and, I would add, even more dangerous.”
How, then, did the drone attacks, like the Wagner mutiny, chip away
at Putin’s meticulously built illusion of control?
It’s no secret by now that Russia does a lot of things poorly. The recent Wagner episode may
have illustrated that Russia, once purportedly the second best military in the world, now clearly the
second-best military in Ukraine, may in fact even be the second-best military in its own country.
Jokes aside, Russia had always approached air defense with all the commitment and zeal its
Cold War coffers could muster. Readying itself for an inevitable showdown with a NATO rival who,
it felt, would possess air superiority in the event of a direct confrontation,
Russia felt it had to invest heavily in its own ground-based air defenses.
And invest it did. By the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, it was once safely assumed that
Russia’s homeland air defense capabilities were among the best in the world, boasting
a layered system of long-range S-200, S-300, and S-400 systems which have an air defense
radius of 800 kilometers, medium range 9K37 Buk systems and its many variants,
which increase radar coverage within its air defense zone and bolster the relatively sparse
number of longer-range interceptor missiles. And then you have the short-range mobile systems like
the 9K33 Osa and S-125 Neval, which can directly cover key installations like military bases,
airfields, and other locations.The first and second tier systems are protected by
Pantsir S-1 and Tor systems, which protect more expensive, long range
interceptors from the hypersonic and cruise missile threats they are most vulnerable to.
Or at least, they are supposed to. If the drone attacks were in fact launched from
Ukraine in broad daylight, these relatively slow-flying drones would have been spotted by
Russia’s air defenses even at low altitudes and, therefore, certainly could, nay, should
have been downed well before they reached their final destination. But several of them weren’t.
In a move that would have made British Parliamentarian Stanley Baldwin proud,
who boldly but inaccurately proclaimed in 1932 that “the bomber will always get through,” those
little drones flew and kept on flying right past Russia’s Pantsir air defenses until they
smashed right into a residential high-rise. Intended or not, where does that leave us?
Well, basically we now know that while Ukraine has proven that it can pretty safely protect
its major cities from 90% of Russian air attacks using things like the American-donated Patriot
air-defense system, which notably not too long ago downed a Russian hypersonic Kinzhal missile–an
impressive and astonishing achievement–Russia has proven that it is not only unable to maintain its
mobile air defense systems in Ukraine, which Ukraine has systematically destroyed in such a
manner as to leave its government increasingly incapable of replacing them–but that it also
can barely protect its own military airfields, command nodes, supply hubs, and capital alike.
It’s not easy to tell what is going wrong or even what is going on in Russia. Common sense tells
us that the drones should have been launched from within Russian territory so they could
have avoided targeting by Russian air defenses until the last minute. But here we are in 2023,
and Russia has demonstrated its incompetence with protecting and using its modernized air defense
systems going back to the sinking of its flagship, the Moskva, a ship sunk by two aging anti-ship
missiles of the type it was expressly designed to protect the entire Black Sea fleet from. It
has been speculated that the Moskva’s crew did not have its air defense radars powered up in
that episode, leaving it critically vulnerable to the strike that instantly made a pricey ship
an artificial reef. There are other reports that Russian crews often leave off defense radars in a
way that makes exposed groups into juicy targets for Bayraktar drones. Add to this the verifiable
evidence that safety pins were in place on mobile air defense systems after capture,
something which would have prevented their radars from working in the first place.
Could Russia’s air defense crews truly be this bad
at their job? Perhaps at the start of the war, sure. But now? Today?
Russia hasn’t done much to dispel our doubts. Recently, it left its borders so insecure that
anti-Putin Russian partisan groups were able to stage a two-day cross-border raid which captured a
border checkpoint and overran several settlements in Russia’s Belgogrod region. The leader of the
Freedom of Russia Legion, one of these groups, has recently told western journalists “that his
fighters are afraid of nothing and no one can stop them from seizing power and finishing off
Putin.” “We are gathering strength and getting ready,” he said. “It’s just a question of time
before our banner is flying above the Kremlin.” Yes, the problems are mounting in Russia itself.
Ukraine has done a masterful job seizing the moral high ground in the war thus far.
It could have easily used explosive suicide drones in the May attacks. But that does not
really fit Ukraine’s MO thus far. For one, attacking civilians with kamikaze
drones is a war crime. Putin may not register a modicum of regret for authorizing such attacks,
but Ukraine cannot afford to. It needs the moral high ground to continue retaining its support from
the West. There is a deep and abiding frustration in the halls of power both within and without
Ukraine that holds that if Russia gets to fight dirty, Ukraine should too. But Ukraine has loftier
ambitions. It hopes one day to even join the EU and NATO. To do this, it must continue to abide
by Western expectations that it is waging a just war, which it has heretofore done.
Launching a drone attack on an affluent Moscow neighborhood may just have been Ukraine’s way
of blurring the clearly demarcated lines in the sand. It was designed to rattle cages.
To cause regular Russians to feel that sense of deep-seated fear they have not been accustomed to.
In some respects, the attacks had the opposite effect. In the aftermath of one of the drone
attacks on the wealthy suburb, many regular Russians actually celebrated the strike. The
wealthy elites, many claimed, the one tier of society untouched by war deserved to be targeted.
The celebrations gained so much traction that certain Russian military bloggers–sycophantic
to the Kremlin, clearly–began to issue appeals for all Russians to unite. Predictably, Russian
propagandists and television presenters played up the nature of the attacks, likening them to
terrorist attacks akin to those which rocked Russia in the late 1990s and early 2000s and
searching for scapegoats, enemies of the state, and foreign agents who may have been involved.
What is clear is that the attacks fit a broader pattern of destabilizing operations being
conducted within Russia itself designed to reveal potentially deadly fissures in the country’s
civil-military apparatus. The May 3 drone attacks were only the start. The invasion of the Belgogrod
region and the broader threat posed by the Freedom of Russia Legion and the Russian Volunteer Corps
have brought war home to average Russians as the soldiers defending them are taken prisoner,
their settlements are shelled, and their territory is momentarily occupied. In these attacks,
footage emerges of a mass exodus of prisoners. Official Russian media pretends everything is
normal. But underlying it all is the painfully present reminder that Russia is increasingly
unable to keep its own civilians safe. That Putin is failing at his job.
Add to that the desperate scenes of the Wagner Mutiny. Attack helicopters and aircraft being
shot out of the sky. Entire command centers being captured in a matter of hours. Huge
convoys marching on Moscow. Sand barriers, holes, and overturned trucks littering the road in an
attempt to slow their advance. Military vehicles in the streets of Moscow preparing for imminent
war. A warning from the Mayor of Moscow to take Monday off–things could, after all, get nasty.
But that is the history of Russia. Its leaders overreach. It becomes overconfident. And in the
end it is unable to protect itself from the very situation it created.
The drone attacks undoubtedly raised questions about Moscow’s air defense capabilities.
Some experts claim that even though the majority of the drones were shot down,
the fact a few got through indicated to Kyiv that Moscow was vulnerable to
air attack–that a percentage could get past their air defenses. Like other,
more damaging attacks on vulnerable depots, supply nodes, and other targets, these are
symbolic attacks. They are meant to strike the Russian psyche–the unfounded air of invincibility
they themselves have drawn over their people. For long, they have felt they were untouchable.
No longer. Polls are starting to reveal that one of the main topics of conversation within
Russia is the war, something that, nine months ago, few cared to discuss. Like it
did with everything else, the Kremlin tried to downplay the attacks. If they continue,
however, will the Kremlin be able to convince the population that this is the new norm?
War is now at Russia’s doorstep. The jury is still out whether or not it can actually defend itself.
But what do you think? Is this drone incident the beginning of the end for Putin? Let us know in
the comments and don’t forget to subscribe for more military analysis from military experts.