{"id":262053,"date":"2026-01-01T18:24:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-01T18:24:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/262053\/"},"modified":"2026-01-01T18:24:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-01T18:24:08","slug":"ukraine-did-not-target-putins-home-cia-finds-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/262053\/","title":{"rendered":"Ukraine did not target Putin\u2019s home, CIA finds \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

The CIA has determined that Ukraine <\/a>did not target president Vladimir Putin<\/a> of Russia <\/a>or one of his residences in an attack this week, according to US<\/a> officials, rebutting an assertion Mr Putin made in a phone call to US president Donald Trump<\/a> on Monday.<\/p>\n

CIA director John Ratcliffe briefed Mr Trump on the finding, a person familiar with the matter said.<\/p>\n

Mr Trump has not directly acknowledged the intelligence, but on Wednesday, he posted on social media a link to a New York Post editorial that blamed Putin for standing in the way of a peace deal with Ukraine and cast doubt on the veracity of his claim<\/a> that he was the target of an attack. <\/p>\n

On Monday, Mr Trump had said he was \u201cvery angry\u201d about the purported attack when Mr Putin told him about it.<\/p>\n

The CIA declined to comment, and the White House referred questions to Trump\u2019s social media post.<\/p>\n

Russia had used the claim to threaten to harden its stance in negotiations as thorny issues already appear to be hampering talks to end the war. But it has not presented any clear-cut evidence of the purported drone attack, which it said was aimed at Putin\u2019s residence in the Novgorod region, a rural part of the country.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0\u2018Complete fabrication\u2019: Ukraine denies Russian claim it attacked Putin residence with dronesOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Instead, the finding by US intelligence officials, which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, aligns with the Ukrainians, who adamantly denied the Russians\u2019 allegations.<\/p>\n

In a post on social media, president Volodymyr Zelenskiy of Ukraine called the claim \u201ca complete fabrication intended to justify additional attacks against Ukraine, including Kyiv, as well as Russia\u2019s own refusal to take necessary steps to end the war.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Monday, even as Mr Trump said he was angry about the purported attack, he conceded that he had no independent confirmation and that it was \u201cpossible\u201d it had not happened.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a delicate period of time,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is not the right time. It\u2019s one thing to be offensive because they\u2019re offensive. It\u2019s another thing to attack his house.\u201d<\/p>\n

The episode came shortly after Mr Trump and Mr Zelenskiy met at Mar-a-Lago, the president\u2019s private club and residence in Florida. The two leaders appeared upbeat Sunday after meeting, though they appeared to make little progress on two of the biggest obstacles to lasting peace: security guarantees for Ukraine against future Russian aggression and Russia\u2019s demands for Ukraine to cede significant amounts of territory.<\/p>\n

Steve Witkoff, Mr Trump\u2019s special envoy, said on Wednesday that he and other senior administration officials had spoken with Rustem Umerov, a top Ukrainian national security official, and other European national security officials about their efforts to end the war.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe focused on how to move the discussions forward in a practical way on behalf of @POTUS\u2019 peace process, including strengthening security guarantees and developing effective deconfliction mechanisms to help end the war and ensure it does not restart,\u201d he wrote on social media, referring to Mr Trump.<\/p>\n

– This article originally appeared in The New York Times<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The CIA has determined that Ukraine did not target president Vladimir Putin of Russia or one of his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":262054,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[9,10,18527,356,13,14,6,11,12,15,16,5,550,7,8,2263,65,66,67],"class_list":{"0":"post-262053","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-breaking-news","9":"tag-breakingnews","10":"tag-cia","11":"tag-donald-trump","12":"tag-featured-news","13":"tag-featurednews","14":"tag-headlines","15":"tag-latest-news","16":"tag-latestnews","17":"tag-main-news","18":"tag-mainnews","19":"tag-news","20":"tag-russia","21":"tag-top-stories","22":"tag-topstories","23":"tag-vladimir-putin","24":"tag-world","25":"tag-world-news","26":"tag-worldnews"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=262053"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262053\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/262054"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=262053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=262053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=262053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}