Russia Strikes a Ukrainian Port on the Danube River: Live Updates
When an office building next to her gleaming glass residential skyscraper in Moscow was hit by a drone filled with explosives early on Sunday, Mari Kletanina seemed worried.
A popular nutritionist on Instagram, she asked her tens of thousands of followers whether she should be thinking about moving away from the area or from Russia altogether.
But after the same thing happened on Tuesday at the crack of dawn, Ms. Kletanina already seemed to have moved on, focused instead on choosing her dress for the day and recommending her favorite perfume.
With Ukraine signaling that strikes inside Russia have become part of its strategy, and residents of some of the most expensive areas of Moscow grasping the reality that the war will not leave them untouched, some Russians resorted to a common tactic: trying to push the bad news out of their minds to go on with their daily lives.
“People are consciously or unconsciously ignoring it,” wrote Aleksandr Kynev, a Russian political analyst. “They want to shut themselves from it because they want to preserve their lives to be as normal as possible.”
Their efforts have been aided by Russian state television, which dismissed the incidents as minor and emphasized in their reports that the drones, suppressed by means of electronic warfare, caused little damage.
Mirlan Yzakov, who owns an investment company with an office in a Moscow tower, said that he learned about the attacks on the news and that it didn’t affect his work flow. His team continues to work from their offices, he said.
“This is the time of сonflict, a conflict of interests, so this is a natural procedure,” Mr. Yzakov said. “We live in a difficult time.”
Russian government officials seemed to be more serious about the threat.
Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, compared the attacks with 9/11, but Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, said he doesn’t see any parallels. Speaking with reporters on Tuesday, Mr. Peskov said that the recent drone attacks demonstrated that “there is a clear threat” and that “measures are being taken” to improve defenses of the capital.
The country’s bloggers tried to portray the attacks as an act of desperation by Ukraine, aimed at diverting media attention at a time when the Ukrainian counteroffensive has been slowly progressing.
“There is zero military damage,” Andrei Perla, a political commentator for Tzargrad, an ultranationalist television channel, wrote on Sunday after the first attack, “But there is a psychological effect.”
At least 28 drones have attacked Moscow and the surrounding suburban region over the past three months, according to Verstka, a Russian news website. They have done little damage and have never led to severe injuries, but have hit a wide range of targets: from the Senate Palace in the Kremlin, the main office of President Vladimir V. Putin, to buildings just a stone’s throw away from the main military headquarters.
The towers that were hit on Tuesday and over the weekend have been billed as a symbol of an oil-fueled, booming Russian economy that was getting integrated into the global economy — a process that has been abruptly halted by the invasion of Ukraine.
The Russian digital development ministry, whose offices were hit by one of the drones, sent its staff to work from home, the agency’s representative told Interfax, a news agency, on Tuesday.
Maksim Khodyrev, a real estate agent who specializes in the Moscow area, said that after the second attack he began to receive letters from apartment tenants saying that they no longer felt safe and “are thinking about canceling lease agreements.”
“If this will be the end of it, in one month everyone will forget about these incidents and things will go back to normal,” Mr. Khodyrev said in written comments. “If attacks continue, then there will be no new sales at the current prices.”
Source: The New York Times
