Ukraine denies any involvement in alleged Kremlin drone attack
Ukraine denied any involvement in an alleged drone attack on the Kremlin that Moscow has blamed on Kyiv.
A senior Ukrainian presidential official, Mykhailo Podolyak, said Ukraine had nothing to do with the drone strike, stating on Twitter that “Ukraine wages an exclusively defensive war and does not attack targets on the territory of the Russian Federation.”
Rather, he said the allegations suggest Russia was planning a large-scale “terrorist” attack against Ukraine in the coming days.
Serhii Nikiforov, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s spokesman, also told the Ukrainian Pravda news outlet that Kyiv was not involved in the incident.
“We have no information about the so-called night attacks on the Kremlin, but as President Zelenskyy has repeatedly stated, Ukraine directs all available forces and means to liberate its own territories, not to attack foreign ones,” he told the news outlet in comments translated by NBC News.
Nikiforov said Russia’s description of the incident as a “terrorist” attack was interesting given Russia’s repeated attacks against Ukrainian territory over the course of the war.
“A terrorist attack is the destroyed houses in Dnipro and Uman, or a rocket fired at the train station in Kramatorsk and many other tragedies. And what happened in Moscow was obviously an escalation of the situation in light of May 9,” alluding to Russia’s upcoming Victory Day parade commemorating the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in World War II.
The Kremlin towers and Ivan the Great Cathedral in Moscow.
Kirill Kudryavtsev | Afp | Getty Images
The comments come after the Kremlin claimed Wednesday that Ukraine tried to strike the Kremlin with drones overnight, but said the purported attack on the heart of the Russian government was “successfully repulsed.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin was not injured in the incident, the Kremlin said. It provided no evidence to back up the claim of an attempted…
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