MOSCOW: Russian Fore­ign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Friday the alleged drone attack on the Kremlin could not have happened without Washing­ton’s awareness and warned Russia would respond with “concrete actions”.

“It’s clear that without the knowledge of their minders, the terrorists from Kyiv could not have carried out (the attack),” Lavrov said during a visit to India, referring to Washington.

On Wednesday Russia said it had thwarted a drone attack on the Kremlin, in what it said was a Ukrainian assassination attempt on Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“We will respond with concrete actions,” Lavrov said on Friday.

Ukraine has denied responsibility, with Ukrai­nian President Volodymyr Zelensky saying “we do not attack Moscow or Putin”.

The United States also rejected any accusation of involvement, and accused the Kremlin of “lying” about its role in the drone attack. European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell warned Moscow on Thursday “not to use this alleged attack as an excuse to continue escalation of the war”.

US experts’ view

The drones that crashed over the Kremlin earlier this week probably evaded an extensive number of defen­ces in and around Moscow, suggesting they might have been launched from inside Russia, US-b­as­ed drones experts said.

Footage of the unmanned aircraft has sent governments and open source intelligence analysts on a hunt to discover the origin of the drones designed to fly to a destination and explode.

Moscow has been very concerned about protecting the Kremlin from drones since at least 2015 when it began using electronic countermeasures to automatically direct them away by “spoofing” GPS locations, said Dana Goward, president of the non-profit Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, which advocates tougher and redundant GPS.

Published in Dawn, May 6th, 2023