TAKE THE WAR TO MOSCOW:

The thwarted drone strike on the Kremlin may have been the incident that grabbed all the international headlines. But this was just one of a spate of apparent attacks in Russia in recent weeks. The war in Ukraine, it seems, is increasingly making itself felt in Russia itself.

On 6 May, an author and blogger, who goes by the name Zakhar Prilepin, became the latest Russian nationalist to be targeted by assassins. As he told it from his hospital bed, he was driving outside Nizhny Novgorod, a city more than 400km east of Moscow, when his car was struck by a bomb. His friend, sitting in the passenger seat, was killed. Prilepin survived, albeit with serious injuries. Social media showed pictures of the crater which had apparently been left by the explosion. Prilepin said a second bomb had been planned as well, but the presumed assassin had taken flight.

Over the past two weeks, small-scale shelling and acts of sabotage have also been reported, mostly in parts of Russia close to the Ukraine border. Four people were killed in the shelling of a village, Suzemka, just a few kilometres inside Russia. Then, two goods trains were derailed on successive days in the west Russian region of Bryansk. The railway authorities blamed these incidents on 'illegal interference in the work of railway transport'. The regional governor blamed them explicitly on explosive devices. The same week, there were two drone attacks on an oil refinery in the Krasnodar region of southern Russia, and reports of power lines being destroyed south of St Petersburg, again by explosive devices.

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