Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi has denied Ukraine’s involvement. The United States has denied allowing attacks to be carried out across the border.
U.S. intelligence officials believe Ukrainian special or intelligence forces orchestrated the drone attack on the Kremlin earlier this month. Anonymous official sources tell The New York Times about it.
Representatives of the White House, the CIA, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, ODNI, declined to comment to the newspaper.
Russia said it shot down two drones over the Kremlin Palace in Moscow in early May, which it claimed had targeted the president Vladimir Putin to the official residence. Russia considers Ukraine to have carried out the attack at the initiative of the United States.
President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyi has denied Ukraine’s involvement, and the United States has denied enabling cross-border attacks.
According to The New York Times’ sources, US intelligence does not know which unit carried out the attack, but thinks it was part of the secret operations of the Ukrainian security service. It is unclear whether Zelenskyi or the rest of the Ukrainian leadership knew about the operation.
The intelligence service bases its assessment on communications from both Ukrainian and Russian authorities. Based on the current information, The New York Times’ sources do not think it very likely that the Ukrainian government directly authorized the attack, because the intelligence has no evidence of those involved in the attack, at least for now.
Making assessments is complicated by the fact that the actors of Ukraine’s security services have secret and partly overlapping responsibilities. Sources believe that some of the covert operations are carried out without the direct supervision of the country’s leadership, so that the leadership can deny knowing about them.