In the aftermath of the meeting at Mar-a-Lago between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, Moscow reopened the narrative front by accusing Ukraine of attempting a drone attack against President Vladimir Putin’s residence. The words of Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who spoke of state terrorism and of the shooting down of 91 drones by Russian defences, are part of a crucial diplomatic passage: the White House keeps repeating that the peace agreement would be‘95% concluded’, while the Ukrainian president tries to preserve Washington’s political support and the Kremlin tries to steer the negotiations towards territorial and strategic concessions to its own advantage.

Ukraine has rejected all responsibility. For Zelensky, this is yet another Russian disinformation offensive, a rhetorical operation to undermine the climate of the talks, to compact domestic opinion and, above all, to exert psychological pressure on Trump, known – according to many observers – for his permeability to the last source of influence with which he interacts.

But while an actual attack remains possible in the context of a high-intensity war that has seen Kiev strike military targets on Russian soil since 2022, the episode raises deeper questions: what evidence has the Kremlin provided? What value do statements have in the absence of corroboration? And, above all, what impact does ambiguity have on the possibility of a stable and credible peace?

The missing evidence and the contradiction of the Russian message

On a factual level, the architecture of the prosecution appears fragile. The Russian Defence Ministry released a night-time video in a snowy forest, in which a soldier points to a damaged drone. The absence of time coordinates, verifiable geographical references and metadata makes it impossible to attribute the incident with certainty. Even more significantly, in the previous hours it was Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov who had ruled out the dissemination of evidence: an admission that clashes with the subsequent communicative emphasis of official propaganda and Tass, which tried to reverse the burden of proof, claiming that drone fragments would ‘disprove the absence of evidence’.

This oscillation is not a minor detail. In four years of conflict, the Kremlin has systematically nurtured a hybrid information ecosystem, where the line between institutional communication and psychological operations is blurred. From repeated denials of attacks on civilians – despite independent investigations and European and UN dossiers proving their recurrence – to hard-to-verify claims of sabotage and Ukrainian offensives, the credibility of Russian sources remains a structural problem.

As American diplomacy tries to transform itself from mediator to potential guarantor, this asymmetry of trust becomes a political factor, no longer just a communicative one.

Why Kiev would have little to gain from escalation at this stage

The timing of the Russian accusation raises a further logical objection. Ukraine has in the past shown the ability to conduct daring raids, such as Operation Spiderweb, in which low-cost aerial drones destroyed Russian strategic bombers at remote bases.
However, hitting a symbolic infrastructure such as a presidential residence in the midst of advanced negotiations with Washington would risk sabotaging the only political-military channel that Kiev depends on to rebalance the balance of power.

Zelensky’s interest today is only one: not to lose Trump. And this is consistent with his public reaction, aimed at denouncing the Russian frame, rather than exploiting the episode in a military key.

From a rational point of view, a deliberate attack against a domestic political target in Russia at this stage would produce more costs than benefits for Kiev.

The influence of ‘who has the last word’ and the game for Trump’s ear

The real target of Russian communication seems to be not so much the military attribution of the incident, but the political influence on the mediator.
Putin and his apparatus know that the US administration is looking for a quick diplomatic hit to spend internally. At the same time, they are familiar with a character trait of the US president: his propensity to legitimise the last heard version, especially if it is accompanied by an interlocutor who presents himself as ‘pragmatic’ and agreement-oriented.

Trump’s statement to a journalist – ‘Putin told me this morning ‘ – does not prove the authenticity of the attack, but it does demonstrate the effectiveness of the message. This is the key point: the US president has the intelligence means to assess such an event, but he also has a long history of selective scepticism towards his own intelligence services, often superseded by personal relationships, impressions and political instinct.

For Moscow, insinuating the idea of Ukrainian escalation serves to rebalance the table, dissuade Washington from conceding too much to Kiev, and keep the conflict within a framework of ‘shared blame’, which weakens the Western – European and Atlantic – principle of aggressor responsibility.

Peace is not a percentage

To say that an agreement is ‘at 95%’ does not mean that peace is close.
Rather, it means that a perimeter of discussion has been found on which both sides agree to talk. But the knot of security guarantees, the future of the occupied territories, the protection of the civilian population, the legal framework of reconstruction and the issue – decisive for Europe – of the strategic continental balance remain outside.

If the truth about drones is not clearly ascertained and entrusted to an independent investigation, the risk is that diplomacy will turn into a negotiation not between states, but between narratives, where it is not who is right, but who influences better, that wins.

And a peace built on opposing and unverified versions is not peace: it is an unstable cease-fire.

Fact-checking is not a technical detail but a political act

In this historical phase, liberal and pro-European Europe must demand a firm point: peace can be negotiated, but facts cannot.
Ascertaining what happened is not an exercise for analysts: it is the only way to remove the diplomatic process from the logic of information manipulation.

It does not mean excluding Ukrainian responsibility a priori.
It means not accepting Russian attribution without verifiable evidence. Because when one renounces verification, one also renounces international law, and when one abandons international law, there is no peace left to defend, but only an agreement of convenience to be rewritten at the next drone – true or alleged.