Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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The Russians are claiming that Ukraine attempted to assassinate Vladimir Putin with a drone attack on one of his houses in Russia. The Ukrainians claim this was a false flag by Russia. I could buy either explanation to be honest.
Putin has many of those palaces and hideouts. And Ukrainians likely don't have minute-for-minute data of his movements. So did they try to hit one of the large building complexes in which at some other point of time Putin may have stayed? I can believe that, the locations are known and getting a drone in there is not much harder than getting a drone into a strategic airfield, which Ukrainians already did several times. Is it enough to call it "attempt to assassinate Vladimir Putin"? Not even closely so. Maybe "attempted to assassinate Vladimir Putin's pride" would be more appropriate.
Of course, since the talks are going on, as likely as not the Russians are faking the whole thing to get some PR advantage. But it really doesn't matter too much - Ukrainians can hit stuff within Russia, had been done many times. They can't hit enough of stuff for it to be of any consequence to the overall war, and they don't have operative capacities to pull something as big as hit on Putin personally. But they can hurt Russians' pride and piss them off, and cause them some tactical setbacks. Which is not a bad thing by itself - but better to concentrate of degrading Russia's refining, manufacturing and transport capacities. Unfortunately, that's also not going fast enough to matter on the ground.
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