Russia has said it will revise its position on peace talks after Ukraine was accused of attacking President Vladimir Putin’s country residence.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Ukrainian forces attacked the presidential residence in the Novgorod region on Monday with 91 long-range drones, all of which were destroyed by Russian air defences. No one was injured and there was no damage, he added.
Mr Lavrov said targets in Ukraine had already been selected for retaliatory strikes. “Such reckless actions will not go unanswered,” he said. The attack amounted to “state terrorism”, he added.
Mr Lavrov noted the attack took place during negotiations about a possible Ukraine peace deal and while Russia will not abandon the talks, its position will be “reviewed”.
There are suggestions that while Russia's military continues to seize Ukraine territory, Moscow does not want a peace deal.
Ukraine denials
Ukrainian officials and open-source intelligence analysts suggested Russia had staged a “false-flag” incident to derail the latest push for peace led by US President Donald Trump.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has just returned from peace talks with Mr Trump in Florida, called the Russian accusation a lie and suggested it was an attempt to derail the talks.
He said Moscow was laying the ground to hit government buildings in Kyiv, after Mr Lavrov warned targets had already been determined in retaliation.
Mr Putin held a phone call with Mr Trump shortly after the incident and told him Russia will reconsider its position on the peace talks.
Mr Trump said he was “very angry” about the strike, after he had “learnt about it” from Mr Putin.
“It's a delicate period of time,” he said. “It’s one thing to be offensive – because they're [Russia] offensive – it's another thing to attack his house. It's not the right time to do any of that.”
It was not immediately clear if Mr Putin was in the Dolgiye Borody residence that has been used by Josef Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev and Boris Yeltsin.
International condemnation
The UAE’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs strongly condemned the incident, denouncing it as a “deplorable attack” and highlighting “the threat it poses to security and stability”.
It reaffirmed the UAE’s solidarity with Russia and its “unwavering rejection of all forms of violence aimed at undermining security and stability”.
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi said he was “deeply concerned” and called for diplomatic efforts to find a “viable path toward ending hostilities and achieving peace”.
China's Foreign Ministry urged both sides to abide by the principle of “no spill over of battlefield” and called for no further escalation despite Russia's threat to respond.
No ‘observed evidence’
The Washington-based Institute of the Study of War think tank said the strikes did “not conform to the pattern of observed evidence when Ukrainian forces conduct strikes into Russia”.
Such evidence includes geolocated footage of “air defence operations, explosions, fires or smoke plumes near targeted objects”, none of which had been observed near the residence to corroborate Mr Lavrov’s claim.
“The Kremlin has offered no evidence to support its claim that Ukrainian forces targeted Putin’s residence on December 29,” it added.
Orysia Lutsevych, head of the Ukraine Forum at Chatham House think tank, told The National that if the strike was “obvious and powerful” then US intelligence would have seen it from satellite images and other sources.
She said it could be a pretext for Moscow changing its negotiating position and blaming Ukraine for it.
