Notes on the News

What should we make of the Kremlin drone business?

Introducing a new Cosmopolitan Globalist feature: Notes on the News. This is for the occasions—quite frequent—when an item strikes us as a bit too significant merely to note in Global Eyes, where you might miss it, but not quite worthy of a long article (at least as yet). From now on, you’ll be receiving these in addition to the usual programming.

The item that prompted the launch of this feature is the strange story of the Kremlin drone incident:

Footage of a drone exploding over the Kremlin—the center of Russian power and the symbolic heart of the country—has triggered a wave of accusations that stretch from Moscow to Washington, igniting social media-fueled conspiracy theories and confounding experts around the world.

Russia accuses Ukraine of carrying out a daring assassination attempt on president Vladimir Putin. Ukraine has denied it had anything to do with the incident, with Volodymyr Zelensky saying: “We don’t attack Putin, or Moscow.”

Kyiv’s close ally the US has made noncommittal statements so far. Meanwhile, many experts on Russia have raised the possibility that the strike could be a “false-flag” operation from Moscow.

You might receive a Note on the News, for example, when something obviously notable like this has happened, but we’re stumped about what to say because none of us has a clue what it means. You might also receive one if we have an absolutely sensational paragraph’s worth of insight—but that’s all we’ve got. In this case, it seemed as if it would be worthwhile at least to convey what other people are saying about this.

Here’s a video of the UFO hitting the dome of the Russian Senate:

According to Russian state media outlet RIA, “The Kremlin has assessed these actions as a planned terrorist act and an assassination attempt on the president on the eve of Victory Day, the May 9 Parade.” Do they mean to say Putin sleeps on the dome of the Senate? In any event, no one believes them, so the parlor game of the moment is trying to figure out what this actually means.