Did 2025 Almost End With a Bang?

Making sense of the "Putin assassination attempt"

I awoke Monday morning to alarming news: Ukraine had tried to assassinate Putin. Media reports claimed a drone swarm had targeted the Russian president’s residence in the Novrogod region. Russia said they shot down all the drones and that the response “would not be diplomatic.” To underscore how undiplomatic the response might be, Russia’s Doomsday Radio suddenly started playing Swan Lake, signaling an incipient national emergency.

Did a hostile state actor—namely the Ukrainian military, perhaps backed by elements of the US and/or European leadership—really try to kill the Russian president? It’s hard to overstate how crazy that would be. Killing Putin, or even causing an explosion anywhere near him, would be viewed as an attempted nuclear decapitation strike, and would automatically trigger a nuclear response. Scott Ritter writes:

The attack meets two of the criterion set forth in the “Fundamentals of State Policy of the Russian Federation on Nuclear Deterrence”, published on December 3, 2024, regarding acts of aggression designed to be deterred by Russia’s nuclear deterrence forces…Had the Ukrainian attack succeeded, Russia would have carried out massive nuclear retaliation against all of Europe. I don’t think the world understands how close it came to nuclear Armageddon.

An attempted decapitation strike against the world’s biggest nuclear power?! That has been war-gamed more than once: The US uses its first-strike-oriented arsenal to try to destroy Russia’s retaliatory capacity. All of Russia’s ICBMs, air bases, and nuclear capable ships and subs would be targeted. Hitting Putin would be an afterthought…or more likely they would deliberately refrain from targeting the top Russian command so that there would be someone left to negotiate with.

But trying to kill Putin with a drone swarm, while not shooting at anything else, makes no military sense. That would invite a perfectly legal, indeed obligatory, Russian nuclear strike on the West.

Even if crazy, desperate Ukrainians were behind it, it still makes no sense. Ukraine would be first in line to get wiped out.

Since there is no conceivable military rationale for a genuine attempt to assassinate Putin in a Ukrainian drone strike, whether West-backed or rogue, I doubt very much that any such attempt occurred. More likely it was designed to fail. Someone probably decided to fire drones in the general direction of the Russian president and commander-in-chief, but in such a way that none of them could possibly get too close to their ostensible target.

Who would do that, and why? Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson told RT:

The Ukrainian drone attack on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s residence earlier this week may have been staged by elements of the government in Kiev to undermine Vladimir Zelensky… Moscow said the attempt to strike the state residence in Novgorod Region occurred overnight from Sunday to Monday, coinciding with Zelensky’s US visit to negotiate with President Donald Trump. Johnson called the timing suspicious.

“I don’t think he [Zelensky] is that stupid to launch that kind of attack while meeting with Trump,” he argued in an interview on Tuesday. Johnson said he would not be surprised if Ukrainian intelligence personnel, possibly acting on orders from Kirill Budanov, head of the military espionage agency HUR, were involved.

“To do something so outrageous and so blatant while you are sitting there with Trump and your entire delegation to talk peace… There are clear elements in Ukraine that do not want peace, that are profiting too much from this war, and that were trying to sabotage [American mediation],” he added.

Another possibility is that Trump’s neocons were trying to terrorize Putin into making concessions. They could have been sending Putin a message: “We know where you are, we can hit you if we want to, but this time we’ll self-sabotage our strike…next time, maybe not.” That would echo the approach they took with Iran last June, using assassinations and assassination threats to try to intimidate the opponent. Indeed, the timing of the drone strike targeting Putin—which occurred in the midst of negotiations, possibly tying down Putin in a known location—echoed the neocon strategy employed in January 2020 to assassinate Iran’s Gen. Soleimani by luring him to Baghdad on the pretext of negotiations; the attempt to assassinate Hamas’s negotiators in Qatar September 9; and the targeting of Iran’s leadership for attempted decapitation during similarly fake negotiations last June. The moral: If “they” ask you to sit down for negotiations, “they” are probably trying to kill you.

And let’s not be coy: By “they” I mean viciously vindictive hyper-Machievellian tribal psychopaths of the Jewish persuasion. These kosher nostra scumbags have a strategy that will work until it doesn’t, consisting of behaving in cartoonishly evil ways, and then weeping and sniveling and claiming that people who hate evil are bigots. That’s why Israel is not just the global rape capital but also the assassination nation—why it consistently exceeds the bounds of decency and even sanity in actual and attempted assassinations of people it should be negotiating with.

So Trump, who has been owned and surrounded by the Kosher Nostra since he was “made” by Roy Cohn in the 1970s, could have been influenced by Zionist neocons who convinced him to allow a warning shot to be fired in the general direction of Putin, with the ostensible aim of softening up the Russian president’s position in negotiations. That would be in keeping with Trump’s Cohn-influenced approach to negotiations: He favors recklessly aggressive symbolic behavior, ranging from crazy verbal tirades to screwing his business associates’ wives, as a means of disorienting the negotiating partner, establishing a position of superiority, and trying to gain an edge. So if you were a Kosher Nostra neocon advocating firing a shot across Putin’s bow, it might not be all that hard to convince Trump to go along with it.

Trump, of course, says the apparent attempt on Putin’s life was “not good” and made him “very angry.” Obviously that shouldn’t necessarily be taken at face value.

So the “failed drone strike on Putin” may have been some combination of (A) an anti-Zelensky op by Ukrainians, and/or (B) an attempt to soften up Putin by Trumpian neocons.

Are there any other likely possibilities? If you can think of any, feel free to drop them in the comments.

Happy 2026…and let’s pray we make it to 2027.

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