After the Kremlin drones: a week of accusations and denials
A look back at the days before 9 May 2023, when claims of assassination plots, arrests in Crimea and a car bombing in Russia framed the war's information battle.
What did the week leading up to 9 May 2023 reveal about how the war was being framed? Between 3 and 6 May, a series of incidents inside Russia and Russian-occupied Crimea produced allegations that Moscow presented as evidence of Ukrainian terrorism, while Kyiv rejected involvement in the most prominent of them.
The Kremlin drones
On 3 May 2023, Russia accused Ukraine of attempting to assassinate President Vladimir Putin after two drones were shot down near the Kremlin. A spokesman said Putin was not inside the Kremlin at the time, and no one was injured. A video showed at least one drone hitting the compound. Ukraine denied any involvement.
The pattern was clear: an accusation of the gravest kind, made immediately, and a denial from Kyiv. Nothing in the public record from those days settled who launched the drones, and an analysis should not pretend otherwise.
Crimea and Nizhny Novgorod
On the same day, Russia's Federal Security Service said it had arrested seven Ukrainian agents who were allegedly planning a series of high-profile sabotage and terrorist acts in Crimea, including an attack on the Head of the Republic of Crimea, Sergey Aksyonov. The claim came from the Russian security service alone, and the word "allegedly" matters.
On 6 May, the Russian nationalist writer Zakhar Prilepin was wounded and his driver killed when a booby-trapped car exploded in the Nizhny Novgorod region.
The civilian toll
Set against these claims was a verifiable human cost on the Ukrainian side. Also on 3 May, Russian forces shelled Kherson Oblast, killing 16 civilians and injuring 22 others. The scale of that harm, in an attack on civilians, stood apart from the Kremlin episode, in which nobody was hurt.
What it meant
Taken together, the reports showed two competing narratives running in parallel: Russia emphasising threats to its leadership and officials, and Ukraine facing continued shelling of populated areas. For readers assessing governance and public life in wartime Ukraine, the lesson from 9 May 2023 is to separate what was demonstrated, such as the casualties in Kherson Oblast, from what was merely asserted by one side.
