Cui Bono? Even if the drones hit their tagret there was no way they were gonna kill Putin in one of the most fortified buildings outside the Kremlin.
As stupid and irrational as some of the ukrainian commanders are, is there really anyone who would think doing this attack while trump was meeting zelensky was going to help their cause? They all know that Trump is annoyed with ukraine more than he is annoyed with Russia. Someone with the stripes to organize a strike with 91 long range drones must have just a little bit more foresight than to think this would be a good idea. (There could be a deep cover Russian asset inside Ukraine who could organize this but that is a tiny bit too “007” for real life)
Russia isn’t against playing dirty they are just way better at hiding it.
That the attack happened while zelensky was having a meeting with trump is a perfect way to spoil the “last person he talked to” effect on trump in fact it would likely cause an inversion of trump’s mood toward zelensky. (a very “judo” style move of redirecting the opponent’s momentum and using it against them.)
Putin was the guy to tell trump and I’m pretty sure trump trusts Putin more than he trusts most of the people in his own administration.
I can imagine Putin on the phone to trump, hamming it up, acting angry and irrational and saying he is going to kill zelensky. Putin would let trump talk him down which would work his ego. (imagine trump telling the story of how he saved zelensky’s life and stopped a nuclear war in a single phone call)
Meanwhile Putin would extract concessions from trump “Ok I wont nuke keiv or shoot down zelensky’s plane, but I have to do some big strikes or my people will think I’m going soft, you understand. Tell you what I just launch a couple Oresniks at some military targets. It’ll be a big show but it won’t be radioactive and it wont kill millions of civilians.”
Its a way to get trump’s understanding that Russia is going to do a K.O. strike and that it’s the only way to get ukraine to accept the reality that the war is lost. Russia gets to do an attack that could spark a nuclear war under other circumstances.
I wouldn’t discount this as a false flag outright. I have no idea.
But the Ukrainian command are very interested in any sort of cheap stunt that can score them huge media points, especially before or during meetings with Western leaders. It’s not outside their usual MO. If the Ukrainians did it, and they keep true to form, like in previous events, then they’ll claim responsibility in Ukrainian media, right around the time the story starts dying down in western media.
Judging from who can gain from this, I’d say Ukraine has a lot more to gain than Russia.
Russia isn’t interested in dropping Oreshniks in Ukraine. Any damage they cause is damage they’ll end up paying for one way or another, and any Ukrainian civilian they kill, is less support from their relatives and friends for whatever peace they enforce on Ukraine. Russia is winning, Ukraine can do nothing about it. There’s no reason to escalate the war as far as Russia is concerned.
On the other hand, Ukraine has been trying for some time now to provoke Russia into precisely the kind of action you speculate about. They want Russia to get angry and do something outrageously vindictive, so EU armies (and perhaps US too) will have an excuse to deploy. Ukraine knows that its best hope right now is that either NATO intervenes and wins Ukraine back for them, or NATO intervenes and there’s an indefinite treaty-less ceasefire (and then hope that Ukraine can re-occupy lost territory in the next war, after they get refurbished and resupplied). They also need desperate morale boosters, both for their army and the civilian population. And at the very least they need the West to keep its attention on Ukraine, and for the West to believe that Ukraine is still capable of punching back, so they can keep getting funds (for the corrupt oligarchs) and arms (for the neo-Nazis) and some other stuff (for the people doing the actual fighting).
Every drone attack Ukraine has performed over the last year has been for these exact purposes. And every time, they came out after the fact to take responsibility (as a last attempt to rile up Russia, when Russia wasn’t biting, and to give their people the aforementioned morale booster). We’ve been through this multiple times: The Kremlin attack, the intermittent bombing of apartments in Donbass, Crimea, Rostov and Moscow, the bombing of nuclear-dedicated bombers, the bombing of oil infrastructure, the bombing of Russian freighter ships, the bombing of non-Russian freighter ships heading to Russia, the attempts to bomb Russian nuclear submarines, etc.