US intelligence concludes there was no Ukrainian attempt to attack Putin residence

A screenshot from a video released by the Russian Defence Ministry, allegedly showing the debris of an intercepted Ukrainian drone in Russia’s northwestern Novgorod region.

The CIA has concluded that Russian claims that the Ukrainian military launched a massive drone strike on one of Vladimir Putin’s official residences on Sunday were in fact false, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Wednesday.

According to the US intelligence agency, the Ukrainian drones launched at Russia’s northwestern Novgorod region in the early hours of Sunday were in fact targeting a military facility in the same region, the WSJ reported.

After he was briefed by CIA Director John Ratcliffe on Wednesday, US President Donald Trump reposted a New York Post article headlined “Putin ‘attack’ bluster shows Russia is the one standing in the way of peace”, which said that Ukraine had most likely not targeted Putin’s Valdai residence at all.

On Monday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that Ukrainian drones had targeted the presidential residence, adding that Russia would revise its negotiating stance in ongoing US-led peace talks in view of Kyiv’s decision to resort to the use of “state terrorism”.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky immediately denied that Kyiv had attacked Putin’s residence, however, citing the claim as an attempt by Moscow to disrupt peace negotiations while itself attacking the Ukrainian capital.

Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov said that Trump had been “shocked” and “literally outraged” when he heard about the incident from Putin during a telephone conversation, with Putin adding that the attack would not go unanswered. According to Ushakov, Trump responded to the information by saying he was glad he had not supplied Tomahawk missiles to Kyiv.

On Wednesday, the Russian Defence Ministry published a map which it claimed plots the flight paths of Ukrainian drones heading towards the residence at Valdai before they were destroyed by air defence systems.

The ministry said that the attempted attack on Putin’s residence involved some 91 drones. Of those, 41 were shot down over the Novgorod region itself, while another 49 were destroyed over the Bryansk region, which borders Ukraine, with the final drone being intercepted over the western Smolensk region.