We need to talk about the assassination attempt against Russian strongman Vladimir Putin that never happened.
The Kremlin is the political heart of Russia and has been for centuries. A kremlin is the Russian word for a fortress or citadel inside a city.
The Kremlin is a kremlin, and that’s important. It’s a fortress at the center of Moscow, reinforced structures surrounded by a mile-and-a-half long wall, guarded by specially trained interior troops, and has recently seen the addition of antiaircraft missiles. At least, the fact that they can be seen is a recent addition. The Kremlin is also big — tres bolshoi, if you’ll allow me to butcher not one but two languages. The complex covers nearly 70 acres or a good-sized suburban neighborhood.
That’s a heavily armed neighborhood featuring massive government buildings instead of lovely ranch-style homes.
Attacking the Kremlin late at night with two small drones (at least one of which was shot down), going after someone in some unknown location in the massive complex, and calling it an assassination attempt, is like pulling the pin of a small hand grenade in front of one of those four-foot-thick bank vaults, which happens to be empty, and calling it your retirement plan.
You’d fully expect the Kremlin to call Tuesday’s drone attack an assassination attempt, and you’d be right. “We regard these actions,” the Kremlin said in a written statement on Wednesday, “as a planned terrorist action and an assassination attempt on the President.” The statement claims that both drones were disabled by “special services using radar warfare systems” and that any smoke or fire you saw resulted from the “scattering of fragments on the territory of the Kremlin.” There was no “material damage” or casualties.
In other words: even if the Kremlin is lying and one of the drones did manage to put a small bomb on a Kremlin roof, minimal effect is what you’d expect from small drones going up against one of the world’s best-defended government complexes.
Russia went even further than that, though, blaming the U.S. on Thursday. “We know very well that decisions on such actions and such terrorist attacks are made not in Kyiv but in Washington,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said this morning.
Tuesday’s lame attack is now being used as an excuse, perhaps, to escalate Moscow’s ongoing attacks against Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure. “The Russian side reserves the right to respond where and when it deems it necessary,” the Kremlin insisted. Yeah, like that hasn’t already been going on against Ukraine in 2014.
All of this assumes that the attack actually came from Kyiv and wasn’t a false-flag operation, as my colleague Rick Moran wondered earlier on Thursday. Putin is widely recognized to have murdered his way into power, orchestrating the bombing of two Russian apartment buildings and blaming it on the Chechens. Three hundred seven were killed and more than 1,000 wounded. Putin rode the resulting wave of fear from his position as the Kremlin’s chief spook into the presidency.
Or it could be that longtime military analyst and former U.S. Navy officer “CDR Salamander” is correct when he dismissed the false-flag theory on Wednesday: “This was a morale boosting mission [by Kyiv] to tap the Russians on the shoulder to let them know they’re in danger too and not to get too cocky.”
What I did not expect, but perhaps what I should have expected, was American so-called conservatives parroting Kremlin propaganda.
It’s one thing when popular (WHY???) s***poster Catturd excretes yet another post like this one:
Here comes WWIII the warmonger Democrats and Republicans in Washington D.C. have been begging for.
They'll be so happy today. https://t.co/uGoijurrm9
— Catturd ™ (@catturd2) May 4, 2023
But it’s just sad to see Rod Dreher — (once?) a genuine conservative whose work I’ve read and enjoyed for nearly two decades — do the same.
America's Ukraine proxies tried to kill Putin last night. While it's def ballsy to attack the Kremlin itself, it's a major escalation. While Bret Stephens is no doubt tumescent over the news, this is opening a dangerous door that can't be easily closed. https://t.co/pfAjp2dSlO
— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) May 3, 2023
There’s plenty of room for disagreement on the Right over the Russo-Ukraine War. Regular readers here know that I don’t have much use for Ukraine’s corrupt government. But I’m even less a fan of aggressive war and actions that look increasingly like genocide. So keep Ukraine armed as long as they’re willing to fight. But I might be in the minority on that, just among my colleagues here at PJ Media, and we all get along fabulously.
So let’s disagree and argue it out — all the things that got me into blogging more than 20 years ago.
But parroting Kremlin propaganda while it wages a war of aggression — the first major land war in Europe since 1945 — is, as far as I’m concerned, a betrayal of conservative principles.
Recommended: Fox News Is Officially Dying Without Tucker Carlson
Join the conversation as a VIP Member