Whatever the provenance of the two drones that approached the Kremlin early Wednesday morning, one thing was clear: The Russian government wanted the world to know about them.
The Kremlin made a deliberate choice to quickly make public what it claimed was a drone attack aimed at assassinating President Vladimir V. Putin. It published an unusual, five-paragraph statement on its website that named the Ukrainian government as the perpetrator and asserted the right to retaliate against Kyiv.
The Ukrainian government denied any involvement in the alleged episode and there was no way to independently confirm the Kremlin’s claim of an attack.
The Kremlin’s messaging diverged significantly from its response to previous episodes involving attacks on Russia or Russian-occupied territory. They include last August’s car bombing outside Moscow that killed Daria Dugina, the daughter of a leading Russian ultranationalist; the explosion in October that damaged the bridge linking Russia to the occupied peninsula of Crimea; and the assassination of a pro-Kremlin military blogger in St. Petersburg last month.
In those cases, the fiery attacks on prominent Russian targets were impossible to ignore, but the Kremlin did not publish a lengthy statement about them.
This time, the Russian government’s publicity was made all the more notable by the fact that reports on social media of explosive sounds in central Moscow early Wednesday had attracted little attention before the Kremlin’s statement. And publicizing the alleged attack came with a downside: Even though there was no evidence of serious damage, the apparent ability of two unmanned aircraft to penetrate central Moscow’s defenses and approach the Kremlin served as the latest embarrassment for a Russian military that has suffered numerous failures throughout the war.
“The last time the enemy bombed Moscow was in 1942,” said one widely circulated post on Wednesday by a pro-Kremlin blogger.
Now the question is whether Russia will use the incident to justify more and even deadlier strikes against Ukraine. Russia escalated its bombardment of Ukrainian infrastructure after last year’s blast on the bridge to Crimea, and pro-Kremlin voices on social media on Wednesday quickly called for new retaliation.
“We will demand the use of weapons capable of stopping and destroying the Kyiv terrorist regime,” said Vyacheslav Volodin, the chairman of Russia’s lower house of Parliament.
The drone incident comes at a particularly tense moment in Russia’s 14-month war. Ukraine is gearing up to launch a counteroffensive against Russian troops dug in in Ukraine’s south and east. Mr. Putin is preparing for a major public appearance next Tuesday, when Russia celebrates the anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany, Russia’s main patriotic holiday.
By trumpeting the attack rather than denying it, Russian officials were acknowledging their “lack of air defenses, their vulnerability, weakness and helplessness,” Leonid Volkov, an exiled associate of the imprisoned opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, wrote in a social media post. “That means they found some pluses in this and, evaluating them, decided that the pluses would be able to outweigh the minuses.”
Those “pluses” could be to galvanize Russians into more fervently backing the war effort, or to presage a new escalation, Mr. Volkov wrote. The Kremlin’s statement on the attack said Russia reserved the right for “retaliatory measures where and when it sees fit.”
There were no further details on what those measures might be or on Mr. Putin’s next moves. Dmitri S. Peskov, Mr. Putin’s spokesman, refused to even confirm whether the president would return to the Kremlin on Thursday after working from his suburban Moscow residence on Wednesday.
“We’ll let you know in due time,” Mr. Peskov said, according to Russia’s RIA Novosti state news agency.
