Simonyan tweeted: “If the drone attack on the Kremlin was a cunning plan by Moscow to justify firing a kill shot at the Kyiv regime, the situation would look very different by now. Margarita Simonyan, the head of RT, the Russian state-controlled international news television network, said the Kremlin’s somewhat muted response indicated the drone attack was not a false-flag operation by the Kremlin with the aim of justifying further escalation. In an audio message posted on his Telegram channel, Prigozhin said: “As someone who is a radical person, I can say that the use of nuclear weapons in response to a drone, of course, is out of the question.”

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner military group, cautioned against the use of nuclear weapons after the strike. Observers noticed that footage of the drone was not shown on state television on Wednesday evening, as news anchors instead read out the Kremlin’s official statement of the attack. Peskov also said any retaliatory steps would be “carefully considered and balanced” by the Russian leadership. He said Putin was planning to work from the Kremlin on Thursday. Peskov said on Thursday that Putin would not give a special presidential address in connection with the attack and that the normal working situation was in place. However, there are early signs that the Kremlin is keen to project a sense of normality. The former president Dmitry Medvedev said the attack on the Kremlin had left Moscow with no option but to “eliminate” Zelenskiy and his “clique” in Kyiv, while Vyacheslav Volodin, the chair of the State Duma, said new weapons should be used to “destroy the Kyiv terrorist regime”.

Several hawkish senior Russian officials called on Putin to take retaliatory action shortly after Wednesday’s strike. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. For more information see our Privacy Policy. Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties.

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