Speculation is mounting that Russia staged the drone attack on the Kremlin that it blamed on Ukraine, with political analysts saying there are a number of reasons why the alleged strike — which Russia called a “planned terrorist attack” — just doesn’t add up.

Russia accused Ukraine of attempting to attack the Kremlin Wednesday, saying the government in Kyiv had tried to strike at the heart of Russia’s government in Moscow using two unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones.

Russian President Vladimir Putin was not injured, the Kremlin said in a statement, in what it characterized as an assassination attempt (in fact, Putin had not been in the Kremlin at the time of the alleged incident) but did not provide any evidence that Ukraine had carried out the attack.

Ukraine denied any involvement in the incident, with officials saying it more likely signaled that Russia was planning a large-scale terrorist attack against Ukraine in the coming days.

Russia has often been accused of plotting “false flag” attacks that it can blame on Ukraine, and use to justify or escalate its own military aggression against the country as the war drags on into its 15th month.

“Of course, Ukraine has nothing to do with drone attacks on the Kremlin. We do not attack the Kremlin because, first of all, it does not resolve any military tasks,” Mykhailo Podolyak, an Ukrainian presidential advisor, noted.

The Kremlin went further in its accusations on Thursday, claiming that Washington had helped Ukraine to plot and orchestrate the drone attack. Again, it did not provide any evidence for its claim.

‘Staged’ attack?

Defense and political analysts and officials are also viewing the incident with skepticism, saying it’s highly possible that Russia carried out the “attack” itself for a number of reasons, including a possible need to prepare Russian society for a firmer war footing.

“Russia likely staged this attack in an attempt to bring the war home to a Russian domestic audience and set conditions for a wider societal mobilization,” analysts at the Institute for the Study of War think tank said in analysis Wednesday evening.

Several indicators suggest that the strike was internally conducted and purposefully staged, the ISW noted, not least of all because Russia has recently taken steps to increase Russian domestic air defense capabilities, including within Moscow itself.

A still image taken from video shows a flying object exploding in an intense burst of light near the dome of the Kremlin Senate building during the alleged Ukrainian drone attack in Moscow, Russia, in this image taken from video obtained by Reuters May 3, 2023.

As such, the ISW noted, it was therefore “extremely unlikely” that two drones could have “penetrated multiple layers of air defense and detonated or been shot down just over the heart of the Kremlin in a way that provided spectacular imagery caught nicely on camera.”

In addition, the Kremlin’s “immediate, coherent, and coordinated response” to the incident also raised suspicion, suggesting that the attack was “internally prepared in such a way that its intended political effects outweigh its embarrassment,” the think tank noted.

Had the attack been a surprise, the ISW believed, “it is very likely that the official Russian response would initially have been much more disorganized as Russian officials scrambled to generate a coherent narrative and offset the rhetorical implications of a clear informational embarrassment.”

CNBC contacted the Kremlin for a response to claims that it was likely behind the drone attack itself. It has not yet responded....

Wars end long before armistices are signed. A war's end, after all, is a matter of will, of spirit—and popular will is only haltingly, grudgingly reflected in the political machinery of peace talks.]

Though it may seem astonishingly premature to say so, my impression after returning from the Russian front is that the war in Ukraine is over and that the powers that be haven't realized it yet. In the Kursk salient, at least, I can personally attest to the eerie, almost surreal inversion of spirits between the people of Ukraine and Russia. The moral scales have now firmly settled on the side of the Ukrainian defenders, and it is far likelier that Russia itself splinters into its constituent republics than that Ukraine falls to its erstwhile invaders.

I was in Irpin and Bucha nearly three years ago, while they were still smoldering from Russian occupation. The mood then, as we pulled burned bodies with bound hands from the tree lines, was a tragedy-enforced grim determination. Evidence of Ukrainian resistance was everywhere: crates of Molotov cocktails on street corners, invective-laced messages scrawled on storefronts, spent shell casings piled behind makeshift barriers against the intruders—all of it unequivocally pointing to a deep-seated resolve.

In Russia today, it is entirely different—it is a moral vacuum. Its citizens in Kursk fled the Ukrainian advance like smoke in the wind, leaving homes and possessions without so much as a whimper. I saw exactly one makeshift roadblock, consisting of a few chairs and a rake. Russian civil resistance is (or was) desultory at best. The comparison is stark: Despite Russia's enormous advantages in mass and material, the will to fight is fundamentally absent.

Ukrainian morale, meanwhile, is topping the charts—bordering on euphoria even. A fervent passion for taking the fight to their enemies has infected the front and operations are conducted amid a general scrum of units desperate to be part of the action. A sense of Wild West–like possibility draws a cast of aggressive fighters, many eagerly engaging in their own semiprivate pirate operations in the free-for-all. This does not necessarily imply a lack of Ukrainian command and control, only that a willingness to take the fight into Russia is pervasive—the Ukrainian armed forces are like a spirited charger, barely reined in. The ambiance is almost party-like—battle-hardened and battle-hungry troops alike joke and banter at the last gas station before the Russian border, glad and relieved to be free of the grinding stalemate of the last months as they race toward the expanding front.

In Russia meanwhile, there is silence. Of the tiny handful of remaining civilians in the Kursk area, some eagerly interact with the occupiers while the rest furtively attend to their habitual routines. One woman we spoke to turned down an offer of Ukrainian cash (a gift from my daughter), asking bitterly, "And where would I spend that?" Dogs and cats wander the streets forlornly, while herds of sheep move in from the countryside to gorge on the town's unharvested fruit trees.

Those Russians left behind engage in petty low-grade looting of their former neighbors' homes. The overriding sense is one of poverty—physical as well as moral—a kind of community-wide bankruptcy. A faded plaque on a home proclaimed a "Veteran of the Great Patriotic War" once lived there, and my Ukrainian comrade noted how sadly decrepit his home was. "Russians are known for brutalizing their neighbors," he said, "but it is the Russians themselves who are the most brutalized of all because they do it to themselves."

Ukrainian occupiers, for their part, are too busy dashing into and through these small Russian towns to bother much with the spoils of war. Moreover, the comparatively wealthy Ukrainian forces laugh at the grimy and obsolete possessions of their neighbors—continually surprised at the degree of pervasive shortage. Ukrainian soldiers instead feed the abandoned dogs, then move quickly onward to press their advantage at the far fringes of the active front line.

***

The action in Kursk is a reminder to Westerners that the Russian behemoth is far from a monolithic, integrated federation. It is instead a tentative, demoralized, loosely adhered tissue of a nation, held together primarily through fear and learned dependence on the state. Separatist sentiment, never fully extinguished, is rising rapidly in regions like Chechnya and Karelia and across some 85 other autonomous regions spanning 11 time zones, most of which have long traditions of independence.

Leo Tolstoy famously wrote of the Russian army: "This horde is not an army because it possesses neither any real loyalty to faith, tsar and fatherland—words that have been so much misused!—nor valour, nor military dignity. All it possesses are, on the one hand, passive patience and repressed discontent, and on the other, cruelty, servitude and corruption." Things have not appreciably improved since.

Russia's incursion into Ukraine has simply run out of moral impetus. It has the resources, of course, to engage in a substantial amount of lingering mayhem. No doubt it will. But the Ukrainians I've met simply cannot envisage a scenario in which they lose. They are prepared to fight in the streets to the last man, and their commitment to freedom is overwhelming. In contrast to the current Russian mood, which seems largely to be one of confused apathy, Ukrainians have the decided advantage.

Wars are won in the heart of a people, not through the rational calculations of military planners. While there is momentum left in the Russian war machine, it is only a matter of time before reality sinks in that the Russian heart is not in this fight. Whether the war ends in the shattering of its fragile federation or in some half-hearted armistice measures to mitigate its appalling losses, Russia simply cannot go on. The Kursk offensive, for all its complexities and contradictions, has, if nothing else, opened a clear window into the popular wills of each side.

The commander in chief of the Ukrainian military, Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, said Thursday that the Kursk offensive has been effective and the “strategy is working” to block Russian forces from taking more territory in eastern Ukraine.

Syrskyi told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour that the Kursk operation “reduced the threat of an enemy offensive” and prevented a Russian attack, saying Moscow had amassed tens of thousands of troops in the region, including experienced airborne ones.

He also said that Ukrainian forces have stalled the Russian advance in eastern Ukraine, including around the strategic railroad town of Pokrovsk.

“Over the last six days the enemy hasn’t advanced a single meter in the Pokrovsk direction. In other words, our strategy is working,” he said. “We’ve taken away their ability to maneuver and to deploy their reinforcement forces from other directions … and this weakening has definitely been felt in other areas.”

Syrskyi’s comments come as Ukrainian forces face a massive Russian attack in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, with troops closing in on not only Pokrovsk but also the cities of Chasiv Yar and Toretsk, both of which could help Russia advance further if captured.

Ukraine made a surprise incursion into Russia’s Kursk region on Aug. 6, a move that caught Moscow off guard and was initially hailed as a brilliant counteroffensive that demonstrated the Kremlin had weak borders.

But nearly a month since the incursion, Ukraine has not achieved one of its main objectives — diverting a sufficient number of Russian troops from the front lines to Kursk to ease up pressure there — leading to criticism of whether the gamble worked....