Russia’s Medvedev calls for Zelensky to be killed amid Putin assassination attempt claims
Joel Gehrke
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky should be killed, a top ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested after the Kremlin claimed to have foiled a Ukrainian attack.
“After today’s terrorist attack, there are no options left other than the physical elimination of Zelensky and his clique,” Kremlin Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev, a former Russian president under Putin, wrote on social media.
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Medvedev has distinguished himself as a bellicose rhetorician over the last year because Russian relations with the Western world cratered due to Putin’s campaign to overthrow the Ukrainian government. Yet his comments Wednesday were just one part of a truculent chorus after Russian officials accused Ukrainian forces of conducting an ineffective drone attack on “the residence” of Putin at the Kremlin.
“No kind of negotiations can be held with the Zelensky regime,” Russian State Duma member Vyacheslav Volodin, a senior member of Putin’s party in the legislature, wrote on social media. “We will demand the use of weapons that are capable of ending and destroying the Kyivan terrorist regime.”
The incident involved “two unmanned aerial vehicles” that were brought down “without causing any casualties or damage” at the Kremlin, according to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov’s office. Putin was not at the Kremlin at the time, Peskov told state media.
“We view these actions as a planned terrorist attack and an assassination attempt targeting the President,” Peskov’s office said. “Russia reserves the right to take countermeasures wherever and whenever it deems appropriate.”
Ukrainian officials denied conducting such an operation and suggested that the incident might have been perpetrated by Russian dissidents, if not staged by the government.
“We don’t attack Putin or Moscow,” Zelensky told reporters while traveling in Finland. “We fight on our territory. We are defending our villages and cities. We don’t have enough weapons for this. That’s why we don’t use it anywhere [else]. For us, that is a deficit. We can’t spend it. And we didn’t attack Putin. We leave it to [a] tribunal.”
President Joe Biden’s administration evinced skepticism about the Russian allegations but maintained that they don’t know what really happened.
“I can’t in any way validate them; we simply don’t know,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday during a Washington Post live event. “And it’s really hard to comment or speculate on this without really knowing what the facts are.”
Asked if the United States has a “position on such attacks, on leadership during this war by Ukraine or other combatants,” Blinken offered a general endorsement of Ukraine’s right to make its own targeting decisions. “We leave it to Ukraine to decide how it’s going to defend itself, and how it’s going to try to get back the territory that’s been seized from it illegally by Russia over the past 14 months and going back to 2014, back to then,” he said.
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Zelensky’s team suggested that Putin would use the incident to justify a retaliatory operation.
“Russia is clearly preparing a large-scale terrorist attack,” Ukrainian presidential adviser Mikhailo Podolyak tweeted. “Ukraine wages an exclusively defensive war and does not attack targets on the territory of the Russian Federation. What for? This does not solve any military issue.”