Antifake
On Dec. 29, at 4:28 p.m. Moscow time, an “audio statement” from Sergey Lavrov was published on the Telegram channel of the Russian Foreign Ministry:
“🔉 Audio of S.V. Lavrov’s statement
💬 On the night of Dec. 28-29, the Kyiv regime carried out a terrorist attack using 91 long-range strike unmanned aerial vehicles against the state residence of the president of the Russian Federation in the Novgorod Region. All unmanned aerial vehicles were destroyed by air defense systems of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.
No information has been received about casualties or damage caused by UAV debris.
We draw attention to the fact that this action was carried out during intensive negotiations between Russia and the United States on settling the Ukrainian conflict.
Such reckless actions will not go unanswered. Targets for retaliatory strikes and the timing of their delivery by the Armed Forces of Russia have been determined.
At the same time, we do not intend to withdraw from the negotiation process with the United States.
❗️ However, given the complete transformation of the criminal Kyiv regime, which has shifted to a policy of state terrorism, Russia’s negotiating position will be revised.”
The statement looked highly unusual given that, at 7:44 a.m. on Dec. 29, Russia’s Defense Ministry had put out its own summary of the previous night’s drone activity, which made no mention of an attack on any of Putin’s various residences.
According to the Defense Ministry, on the night of Dec. 28-29 (before 7:00 a.m), a total of 89 Ukrainian drones were shot down over Russian territory, with only 18 of them over the Novgorod Region, where Putin’s Valdai residence is located. The largest number — 49 — were downed over the Bryansk Region, which borders Ukraine. The rest were clearly not flying toward Valdai.
According to Lavrov, 91 drones had been intercepted. His statement therefore clearly does not match the official Defense Ministry data — something noted even by bloggers who have never been accused of taking apro-Ukrainian stance.
“Can our officials and people in positions of responsibility manage to stay in step? Especially on matters this important? It seems to me they’re cutting off the wrong parts of the internet,” wrote the Telegram channel Fighterbomber, known for its ties to the Russian Aerospace Forces.
However, at 9:30 a.m., another Defense Ministry report appeared, citing an additional 23 drones shot down, all of them over the Novgorod Region.
Whether the period from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. can be considered “night” is a strange question, but let us assume Lavrov simply misspoke by referring only to the night while leaving out the morning. In any case, let us count: 18 overnight and 23 in the morning over the Novgorod Region, for a total of 41. Those shot down in Adygea, Krasnodar Krai, and the Rostov and Orel Regions, as well as over the Sea of Azov, were clearly not heading toward Valdai. One drone in the Smolensk Region — if it was flying toward Valdai — could have passed through the region near Roslavl or Desnogorsk. That leaves 49 in the Bryansk Region; everything flying from Ukraine to western regions of European Russia would most likely pass through that region. That adds up to 91, as Lavrov later announced. But this is where the oddities begin.
Lavrov proceeds from the assumption that all drones launched toward western regions of Russia were aimed at Putin’s Valdai residence. This is already a fairly bold assumption, since several drones that same night were launched toward the southeast of European Russia, meaning not all forces were focused on striking the residence. This raises the question of how it could be known exactly where a drone shot down over the Bryansk Region was heading. Bryansk itself contains military facilities and oil infrastructure sites that could certainly have been targets of Ukrainian attacks, and drone routes through the region could lead to a variety of other militarily significant sites in the Smolensk, Tver, Leningrad, or Pskov regions. Lavrov nevertheless decided to add them all to the figures from the Novgorod region, which, incidentally, also contains more points of Ukrainian interest than just Putin’s residence.
Another oddity is linked to the second Defense Ministry report from the morning of Dec. 29. As is well known, the Novgorod Region does not border Ukraine; to reach it, a drone would have to cross the airspace of the Bryansk, Smolensk, and Tver regions. Yet the Defense Ministry information contains no mention of drones shot down in those regions after 7:00 a.m. This would suggest that, overnight, air defenses in the Bryansk Region were operating quite effectively, but in the morning they somehow switched off and allowed all subsequent Ukrainian drones to reach the Novgorod Region. If one assumes the second report was not prepared as groundwork for a fake statement about an attack on Putin’s residence, then it is difficult to explain such a sequence of events.
The Telegram channel “Mozhem Obyasnit” (“We Can Explain”) reports that, in Valdai — both on the night of Dec. 28 and on the morning of Dec. 29 — there was no sounds of drones flying overhead and no air defense activity. In addition, residents of the region received no air raid warnings.
Taken together, all this makes Lavrov’s statement appear thoroughly implausible. Still, the presumed intended audience seems to have believed the foreign minister’s unusual story. On Dec. 29, Donald Trump answered journalists’ questions by saying he was “very angry” after learning from Putin about the attack.
Trump immediately clarified, however, that he knew nothing about the attack beyond what Putin had told him, and he assessed Ukraine’s actions in the conditional tense: “That would be very bad. That would not be good.” Most likely, U.S. satellite surveillance capabilities can confirm or refute the picture Putin described in his conversation with Trump.