The White House is strongly pushing back against a Kremlin official who alleged the United States was involved in what he said was an assassination attempt on Russian President Vladimir Putin.
National Security Council Coordinator John Kirby, the White House's de facto national security spokesman, accused Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov of "lying" and called his allegation "a ludicrous claim."
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Russia said on Wednesday that it downed two Ukrainian drones over the Kremlin, an accusation Ukrainian officials have rebutted, and it said the military was able to disable the drones using its electronic warfare. Putin was not in the Kremlin at the time of the supposed attack, which injured no one, according to Russian state media outlet TASS.
“We are well aware that decisions on such actions and such terrorist attacks are not made in Kyiv, but in Washington. And Kyiv is already executing what it is told to do,” Peskov said on Thursday. “Such attempts to disown this both in Kyiv and in Washington are, of course, absolutely ridiculous.”
The U.S. cannot say with certainty what took place or who was responsible for it, but Kirby vocally denied U.S. involvement in the supposed assassination attempt.
"I would just tell you Mr. Peskov's lying. I mean, it's obviously a ludicrous claim. The United States had nothing to do with this. We don't even know exactly what happened here," Kirby said. "But I can assure you the United States had no role in it whatsoever."
He also said the U.S. does not "endorse, we do not encourage, we do not support attacks on individual leaders."
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The Kremlin threatened to retaliate for the alleged plot, saying in a statement, "Russia reserves the right to take retaliatory measures whenever and wherever it sees fit." The announcement raised questions as to whether this could be a Russian false flag operation — a staged provocation used to justify a reaction.
In its latest update, the Institute for the Study of War suggested that “Russia likely staged this attack in an attempt to bring the war home to a Russian domestic audience and set conditions for a wider societal mobilization,” arguing it was “extremely unlikely that two drones could have penetrated multiple layers of air defense and detonated or been shot down just over the heart of the Kremlin in a way that provided spectacular imagery caught nicely on camera.”