Putin’s Chief of General Staff is said to have contradicted the Kremlin’s portrayal

Oreshnik missile attack

Report: Putin’s Chief of General Staff deviates from Kremlin line

Russia’s top general is said to have contradicted Putin’s account. The Kremlin chief had portrayed a rocket attack as a response to actions by the West.

Russian Chief of Staff Valery Gerasimov contradicted an official Kremlin statement in a telephone conversation with his American counterpart, General Charles Q. Brown Jr. This is reported by the New York Times. The conversation between the architect of Putin’s war of aggression and the US general is unusual; the two military leaders last communicated with each other in October 2022. According to defense and military sources, they also discussed the Ukraine war.

The conversation was also said to have discussed the Russian attack with a nuclear-capable medium-range ballistic missile called Oreshnik on the Ukrainian city of Dnipro at the end of November. Russia wanted this to be seen as a warning to the West. “The Russian side has clearly demonstrated its capabilities,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters in Moscow after the attack. The shelling is a result of “reckless decisions” by Western countries.

“We have repeatedly emphasized that the regional conflict in Ukraine provoked by the West has taken on a global character,” Vladimir Putin also said. He spoke of a reaction to the fact that the USA and other countries had allowed Ukraine to use long-range weapons against Russian territory.

But in the conversation between the two top military officials, Gerasimov is said to have deviated from the official account, reports the New York Times. Accordingly, the use of the rocket had been planned for a long time; well before the Biden administration’s decision to allow Ukraine to use ATACMS missiles on Russian territory. There was no official confirmation of the conversation from the Russian side. In addition to the Ukraine war, the conversation was also said to have been about how an escalation between Russia and the USA can be avoided.

A U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff spokesman said in a statement after being asked about the call by a reporter that “General Brown, at the request of General Gerasismov, agreed not to proactively announce the call.”

Apparently the attack was not a reaction to the West, as Putin portrayed, but, as many experts assumed, a demonstration of its alleged strength. “It’s an expensive missile with a nuclear function. You don’t just shoot something like that if you don’t feel like it. Plus, it’s not precise enough to carry a conventional payload. So you could consider it a clever signal,” wrote arms expert Frank Sauer on Bluesky. After the attack, Putin announced that the Oreshnik missile would soon go into series production after further tests.