Oleksandr Kovalenko: Any Third Grader Will Refute This Kremlin Morass

• 14.04.2026, 19:53

What's behind Patrushev's tantrum?

The Kremlin has begun accusing the Baltic states and Finland of allegedly helping Ukraine strike Russian military targets by providing their airspace for Ukrainian drones to fly over. Putin's aide Nikolai Patrushev stated this.

The website Charter97.org asked Ukrainian military and political observer of the group "Information Resistance" Alexandr Kovalenko to comment on these strange statements:

- First of all, Patrushev is a man who made all sorts of statements that later did not correspond to reality at all. And sometimes even Russian official information, which was published later, completely contradicted his statements. I recall his statements regarding Ukraine's involvement in the terrorist acts in Crocusa, to which Kyiv had nothing to do with. Subsequently, the Russian investigation confirmed this. As far as the "high-ranking representative" of a "respected" special agency was concerned, he was essentially quoting and retransmitting fakes, manipulations, and not confirmed and verified information.

Patrushev has now turned into a talking head who needs something to fill the information space in Russia, so that consumers of information fast food in Russia would eat and believe it. Naryshkin alone is no longer enough. They cannot do without the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service alone.

Secondly, this is Russia's way of trying to justify the inability of its air defense systems to prevent Ukrainian drone attacks.

Of course, we can assume that Ukrainian drones somehow fly into Russian territory via the Baltic States or, for example, Scandinavia, but the question arises as to why Poland is not included in these accusations. Ukrainian drones must somehow fly into Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and then probably even into Finland, but how can they fly in from Ukraine? Either through Poland or Belarus.

That is, Belarus, a "union" state of the Russian Federation, provides its airspace for such a route to be used? Or Poland, which is much stronger than Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia in terms of the potential of its army. The Kremlin tries somehow to ignore this question.

The elementary dissonance that arises when you just open a map. Even any third-grader of secondary educational school of the first-third level in the Russian Federation, who opens a geographical map, will simply see the reality that the grandfathers in power in Russia, who impose such information marasmus on consumers of information fast food, do not want to see.

There is a third point, very important, which should be paid attention to. Russia often uses this kind of insinuations and accusations to justify its aggression against one of these countries. For example, for years various kinds of fakes and insinuations were formed against Ukraine regarding bio-laboratories, preparation of some kind of aggression, terrorist acts against Russia, formation of some terrorist groups in Russia, etc.

Generation of various kinds of fake information was carried out non-stop on the eve of a full-scale invasion, even when this information was not even close to logic and common sense. Therefore, I do not rule out that this may be a certain informational preparation for that category of Russian consumers of information fast food, the plebs who are ready to accept it. Russia may indeed undertake a certain operation against one of the Baltic states in the short term at least.

Most likely, again, it may be Estonia as the most vulnerable country of all the countries of the European Union and the North Atlantic Alliance.

A parallel attempt to hide the absolute ineffectiveness of its air defense, its degradation. After all, all the attack drones of the AFU cover the distance to Russian targets precisely through the territory of the Russian Federation.

They are trying to hide this somehow, combining accusations against Western countries, and at the same time Putin is not abandoning his plans to invade one of the NATO countries. They are trying to reunite and combine all of this into a single whole, so that they can justify these strikes, cover up the inability of their air defense, and, of course, to explain to their plebs why we attacked, for example, let's say, Estonia.