Those Russian Fires and Explosions
By 
It’s beginning to look like those fires and explosions in Russia are not accidents.
Away from the active battlefronts within Ukraine, though, there’s a less bloody, less prominent front in the two-month-old war, a shadow campaign that has included attacks on military and industrial targets in Russia itself.
It’s not clear how many incidents have occurred, or whether they resulted from air strikes, or missiles, or sabotage. An unofficial tally by RFE/RL, based on open-source reporting, counts at least a dozen since the war’s beginning.
They’re not all internal sabotage, though.
Early in the morning on April 27, a drone crashed in a muddy field southwest of the Russian city of Kursk, around 100 kilometers northeast of the border with Ukraine. Locals tracked down the destroyed device not long after, and posted photographs to Telegram and other social media.
The device appeared to be a Bayraktar TB2, a versatile Turkish-designed unmanned aerial vehicle capable of long-distance surveillance as well as dropping guided bombs or firing anti-tank missiles.
It wasn’t the Russians who were flying the drone.
But some may be.
Perm is probably outside drone range from Ukraine.
Who’s doing it? Russians? Ukrainian spies? Are they coordinating with each other? The Russian authorities would like to know.
Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner