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Two drones struck inside the Kremlin complex early this morning. We don’t know exactly what happened, but the Russian claims of a Ukrainian attack are doubtful. Russia may now have a domestic-terrorist problem—but it’s more likely that Vladimir Putin’s regime is preparing an excuse for a new escalation.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The costs of Brexit are undeniable now. Can you have a fun vacation on Ozempic? How Tom Hanks became Tom Hanks

A Possible False Flag

Here’s what we know: Early this morning, two drones struck inside the Kremlin (which is actually a walled complex that surrounds several government buildings and ancient churches and palaces). The New York Times has verified three videos, two of which appear to show “a drone flying toward and exploding over the Kremlin Senate,” which houses the president’s executive office, and the other showing the dome of the Senate building on fire.

That’s as much as we know. The Russians, of course, are blaming the Ukrainians, and claiming that the strike was an attempt to kill Russian President Vladimir Putin, who at the time was at his compound in the Moscow suburb of Novo-Ogarevo, Russian officials said. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky denied this charge and specifically denied targeting Putin: “We don’t attack Putin or Moscow,” he said during his visit to Finland. “We fight on our territory.”

But who would (or could) launch such an attack? I see four possibilities in ascending order of likelihood—with the caveat that I am drawing on jumbled and partial information, so treat this as a preliminary and tentative list.

First, it is possible that the Ukrainians or some Ukrainian team in Moscow could have used drones. But it is unlikely, because it doesn’t make much sense. An attack on the Kremlin might be an obvious symbolic move, but a demonstrative strike on an empty building at night would be a waste of already strained Ukrainian intelligence resources, and would likely annoy the Americans and NATO in the bargain. (Also, as one former U.S. defense official noted, the Ukrainians are pretty good at tracking Putin, and if reports of the event are accurate, they likely knew he wasn’t in the building.)

A second possibility is that Russian intelligence and military authorities got wind of a plot by some group to strike the Kremlin, and then let it happen as a way to goad Putin into using even more force in Ukraine. My friend Nick Gvosdev, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, reminded me today that Russian spooks are not exactly averse to such cold-blooded moves: In 2002, terrorists took hostages at a theater in downtown Moscow, and he noted that there have been accusations over the years that the intelligence services knew it was coming and yet let it happen, as a means of strengthening possible demands for more power to deal with such events.

Still, this seems like an overly complicated explanation. The Russian army needs more “cannon meat,” to use the Russian expression, but even the Defense Ministry probably realizes that their campaigns to dragoon more men are reaching their limit. The intelligence services have been in hot water ever since they misled Putin about the chances of success in Ukraine, and they might want to use a bomb hitting the Kremlin to press their claims for more resources and power—but they also run the risk that a drone strike in the heart of the city would look like yet more evidence of their incompetence.

It is also possible that the strike on the Kremlin came from Russian dissidents, especially if it was done with some sort of crude, jerry-rigged device. Again, unlikely but not impossible, especially with social anger rising over waves of conscription that were supposed to take place out in the Russian boondocks and never touch Moscow and St. Petersburg. In this case, the intelligence services would have every incentive to blame Kyiv, because the only thing worse for them than failing to stop a hit from a Ukrainian commando team would be an assassination attempt by Russians right under their noses. Russia is already functionally a fascist state, and a plot to bomb the Kremlin and kill the president might well be the spur for the kind of iron-fisted mass repression Putin and his advisers have avoided until now.

But the most disturbing possibility is that this is a Russian government put-up job from start to finish. There are several reasons this makes more sense than other explanations.

First, an attack on the Kremlin would give Putin the rationalization he’s been seeking for some kind of dramatic and murderous action that might not make much military sense, but that would destabilize Ukraine and unsettle the world on the eve of a major Ukrainian counteroffensive. The Russians, I believe, are dreading this coming operation, and want to change the narrative at home and abroad. I have no idea what Putin has up his sleeve, but even on his better days, he is prone to strategically idiotic moves. He might try to drag Belarus into the war, he could make more nuclear threats, or he could even order redoubled efforts to kill Zelensky.

In any case, faking a drone attack would fit into the long-standing Russian affinity for “false flag” operations. Though conspiracy theorists in the United States often trumpet unfounded claims of false flags, professional intelligence services do conduct such operations, and Moscow has been particularly fond of them all the way back to the Soviet period. The series of apartment bombings in Russia in 1999, for example, that became the pretext for escalation in Chechnya, were almost certainly orchestrated by the secret services (a possibility so disturbing that I and other Russia experts were loath to accept it—but which is now, in my view, undeniable). And in the past year, the Russians warned that the Ukrainians were going to unleash a “dirty bomb,” a ludicrous claim that even led China to give the Kremlin some stink eye for playing around with nuclear threats.

This drone strike looks like the same play, only without nuclear materials. A terrorist attack in the capital would be a pretext for the Russians to warn the world that this time, they’re really going to take the gloves off. Ukrainian officials are worried that this is exactly the Russian plan. Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelensky, told the BBC that the incident indicated Russia could be "preparing a large-scale terrorist provocation" in Ukraine. That’s a pretty chilling possibility, considering that the Russian campaign plan at this point already consists of indiscriminate war crimes.

"Something is happening” over the skies of the Russian Federation, Podolyak said, “but definitely without Ukraine’s drones over the Kremlin.” At this point, I agree, but we’ll soon know more—and we should brace for what’s coming from Russia’s desperate dictator.

Related:

Cover story: the counteroffensive Incompetence and torture in occupied Ukraine

Today’s News

Francisco Oropeza, the man accused of shooting five people in Texas, was apprehended in Montgomery County. Sources close to the defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News revealed the contents of a text message from Tucker Carlson, which is part of redacted court filings and shows his private views on race, to The New York Times. The discovery of the message by the Fox board of directors reportedly contributed to his firing. Representative Colin Allred, a Dallas-area Democrat, will challenge Ted Cruz for his Senate seat next year.

Dispatches:

The Weekly Planet: Climate change is pumping the air with pollen, Yasmin Tayag writes. It’s a problem even for people who don’t think they’re allergic.

Evening Read

Jelka von Langen for The Atlantic

Among Europe’s Ex-Royals

One peculiarity of European aristocrats is that their names pile up, like snowdrifts. It’s lunchtime in Tirana, the capital of Albania, and I am about to meet Leka Anwar Zog Reza Baudouin Msiziwe Zogu, crown prince of the Albanians.

The Albanian royal residence is easy to miss, tucked away on a quiet side street behind the national art museum. While Buckingham Palace has 775 rooms, including 188 staff bedrooms, 19 staterooms, and 78 bathrooms, the Albanian residence would be among the smaller, more understated houses in a wealthy American suburb. Its front gate opens onto a yard where the country stores its unwanted Soviet statues: Lenin, Stalin, and the Albanian Communist leader Enver Hoxha all gaze with stony fortitude at a generic Stakhanovite maiden. Lenin has no arms. Hoxha’s nose is missing. The gate is guarded by an elderly manservant for whom the term faithful retainer might have been invented. Because I am British, his thinly disguised irritation at my presence makes me feel right at home.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

Disney

Read. “Nostrand and Lincoln,” a new poem by Janelle Tan.

“my friend who lives in a basement apartment / with no windows and no light / tells me it is all worth it / because of the people she’s met in this city.”

Watch. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (in theaters this week). It features probably the only Marvel characters that staff writer David Sims still truly cares about.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

One of the most agonizing questions for those of us who began our careers as students of the old Soviet Union—and who were hopeful that Russia could become a normal country after 1991—is whether the whole project of Russian democracy was cursed and virtually impossible from the start. I have always resisted that conclusion; I think Russia was, in fact, a democracy, however flawed, even into Putin’s first term in office from 2000 to 2004. But by the time Putin returned to reclaim his throne for a third time after a short break (mandated at that point by the Russian constitution), Russia was already in something like democratic free fall. Did Putin change, or was he always just a gangster?

I remain unconvinced that everything that happened in Moscow was just a huge plot to doom democracy right from the early days of Russian independence, but good scholars should find the most convincing arguments against their own biases. The best case for the idea that Putin was always an authoritarian who intended to wreck Russian democracy can be found in a highly detailed book by the late Karen Dawisha titled Putin’s Kleptocracy, and I would recommend it to readers who want a history of Putin’s attack on Russian institutions. It is a work that has forced me—uncomfortably—to rethink many of my views, as dispiriting as that can sometimes be.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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These days, many Americans are muddling through an antihistamine haze. Between the sniffling, sneezing, and itching, those I’ve spoken with manage to croak out some version of the same grievance: This allergy season is the worst. I have no choice but to agree. In New York, where I live, the tiny chartreuse blossoms of maple trees and the caterpillar-like catkins of birches and oaks are pollen bombs that seem to be exploding with more vigor than usual. As I write this, mascara is streaming from my lashes in pollen-induced tears. One colleague, reliant on drowsiness-inducing decongestants, has resorted to knocking back an absurd number of espressos to get through the day.

Complaints about allergies arise every spring, but the symptoms really do seem to be getting worse. Blame climate change: Allergy seasons, says Kenneth Mendez, the CEO of the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America, are “getting longer and more intense” because plants are producing more pollen over a longer period. The problem is not just that higher temperatures lengthen plants’ growing season; carbon dioxide itself encourages pollen production. Compared with three decades ago, the North American pollen season now starts about 20 days earlier, lasts roughly eight days longer, and involves 21 percent more pollen, according to research published in the journal PNAS.

But it isn’t just longtime allergy sufferers like me who have it bad. All of this pollen seems to be triggering seasonal allergies in people who have never had them before. Allergies have taken off in recent years: In 2018, 7.7 percent of American adults experienced “hay fever,” another term for seasonal allergies; by 2021, that proportion had risen to about a quarter. Temperatures will only get hotter in the years to come, unleashing even more pollen into the air—potentially making even more people allergic. At this point, not much can be done to stop it.

Whether someone develops seasonal allergies largely depends on two factors: their genetics and their environment. Some people are naturally predisposed to allergies, and climate change isn’t altering that, Kathleen May, the president of the American College of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology, told me. The environment, however, is. The link between temperature, carbon-dioxide levels, and pollen—a fine yellow dust that some plants release in order to reproduce—is very well established. Decades ago, scientists learned that plants thrive in a warm greenhouse with high carbon-dioxide levels and, in the case of some species, produce more pollen than they otherwise would. This is happening now on a continental scale.

An allergy develops when a person’s immune system mistakenly flags a harmless particle as dangerous and starts making allergy-fighting antibodies, known as IgE immunoglobulins, in preparation for the next encounter. When the IgE antibodies detect enough of the allergen, they mount an explosive attack on the hapless invader—releasing chemicals that cause itching, sneezing, congestion, and other classic symptoms of an allergic reaction.

Complicating matters is the fact that not everyone who develops these antibodies and is thus “sensitized” to an allergen experiences symptoms whenever some pollen flies up their nose. (Immunology is notoriously complex.) With seasonal allergies, “it takes a certain amount of time or exposure to make that sensitization cause symptoms,” May said. In other words, some people who think they don’t have allergies actually do—they just haven’t been exposed to enough pollen to experience symptoms yet. The body reacts when it “perceives that there’s too much,” Mendez said.

By pumping the air full of pollen for long stretches of time, climate change increases the chances that people—both veteran sufferers and newbies alike—will meet that threshold. “Some of those people who might not have otherwise had symptoms will now start becoming symptomatic,” May said, and “the people who already have it will certainly get worse.” Some of these allergy newcomers, especially adults, could end up having seasonal symptoms for life. Thanks to a phenomenon called the “priming effect,” it may take less pollen to trigger symptoms in subsequent allergy seasons, meaning that even the slightest bit of pollen in the air could eventually cause nasal chaos. Children sometimes “outgrow” the condition after their teen years, May said, whereas adults are less likely to, for reasons that are not yet clear.

On the whole, though, it’s safe to assume that more pollen means more chances for anyone to experience symptoms. As the planet continues to get hotter, the ranks of seasonal-allergy sufferers will expand substantially, though it’s not clear by precisely how much. According to one study, adults in American counties where spring now starts significantly earlier than the historical average have a 14 percent higher chance of developing seasonal allergies than adults in counties where the onset of spring is within the normal range. In Europe, modeling studies suggest that the number of people who are sensitized to the common irritant ragweed will more than double—from 33 million to 77 million—as early as 2041 because of climate change. Worsening allergies are a worldwide concern, but the changes will not be geographically uniform. In the U.S., these shifts are currently happening faster in Texas and the Midwest, according to the PNAS study. William Anderegg, the study’s lead author and a biology professor at the University of Utah, told me that he isn’t sure why; a possibility is that the plants that grow there are especially sensitive to warmth. Those species could eventually spread as rising temperatures give them opportunities to migrate into new environments.

We’re simply not ready for the full effects of what climate change may mean for allergies. In time, temperatures across the country could become so high that pollen season lasts year-round, as it already does in warmer parts of the country, Anderegg noted. The effects could be especially bad in cities, where daytime temperatures can be up to seven degrees warmer than in neighboring rural areas. And exacerbating pollen counts are societal factors such as low use of over-the-counter allergy drugs and low numbers of allergy specialists in the southern and eastern U.S., making those areas among the most challenging places in the country for allergy sufferers to live, according to a recent report from the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America.

Yet even as pollen fills the air, there’s plenty sufferers can do to ease their symptoms. Given enough warning from pollen forecasts, they could stock up on medications, learn to plan around high pollen counts, and maximize the benefits of anti-allergy drugs by taking them before symptoms begin. Advocating for more advanced pollen monitoring—nationwide counts are often still performed by hand—could help provide more timely forecasts in the long run. Still, there’s no getting around the fact that allergies are yet another inconvenience climate change is introducing into our lives.

Even as America and the rest of the world make tangible strides to reduce carbon emissions, the level of warming that is already baked in means that pollen will just continue to become an even bigger nuisance—one that, in some instances, could snowball. Seasonal allergies are a trigger for asthma, which can lead to hospitalization, and they also make people more vulnerable to some viruses, including the coronavirus. “There’s also this huge set of societal effects that we don’t tend to think about very much,” including decreases in labor productivity and poor student performance at school, Anderegg said. Allergies are obviously far from the most devastating effects of climate change, but the hellishness of this pollen season is a reminder that even the most minor climate impacts can be much more than a nuisance.

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If you walked into a British supermarket this past winter, you were likely to see bare shelves in the salad aisle. Customers might have been limited in purchasing lettuce and tomatoes, if there was any lettuce or tomato to be found in the first place. Ask the grocers, and you’d hear technical explanations for the scarcity. High energy prices raised costs at British greenhouses; imports from warmer countries were curtailed by bad weather in Southern Europe. Behind all of these situational explanations, however, loomed a larger problem.

From the time a tomato is harvested, every minute counts en route to the purchaser’s table. In March, the BBC reported that Britain’s departure from the European Union has added 10 to 20 minutes of additional paperwork to every truckload of tomatoes shipped from Spain—longer if the truckload mixes different produce varieties. Ten to 20 minutes may not sound like much. But multiply that burden by thousands of trucks, squeeze the trucks through the bottleneck of the single underwater tunnel that connects Britain to freight traffic from Europe, and costs and delays accumulate. The result: winter tomato gluts on the continent, winter tomato shortages in the United Kingdom.

[Matthew Goodwin: Britons’ growing buyer’s remorse for Brexit]

The temporary disappearance of some fresh fruits and vegetables for a few weeks in winter may be only a nuisance. Yet such nuisances are ramifying throughout the British economy, signals and symptoms of larger, system-wide trouble. British consumers are spending less on new clothes and shoes than they did in 2018 and 2019. The British are holding on to their cars longer: The average age of the vehicles on British roads has reached 8.7 years, a record. The British made about 2 million fewer trips abroad in 2022 than they did in 2018 and 2019, an almost 20 percent decline. Lingering COVID concerns offer a partial explanation. But the UK and most of its European Union neighbors had dropped most travel restrictions in January 2022 and the remainder by March.

Altogether, Britain is expected to be the worst performing of the world’s 20 biggest economies this year. The British government’s official forecaster predicts that after-inflation household incomes will decline by an average of 7.1 percent over the three years ending in spring 2024. On the present trajectory, Britain will not return to 2019 levels of disposable income until 2027. By 2024, the average British household will likely have a lower living standard than the average household in Slovenia. On present trends, the average British household will be poorer than the average in Poland by 2030.

The pandemic has not helped, but the slowdown of the British economy cannot be explained by COVID. Italy has suffered more deaths from COVID than any other major European country has, yet its economy had mostly recovered to pre-pandemic levels by the end of 2021.

Britain is now paying the price for its decision to leave the European Union. Britain voted to exit in the summer of 2016. The departure was formalized on December 31, 2020. Since then, new barriers to trade, investment, and movement have risen between Britain and its nearest neighbors. Investment in Britain has tumbled, and the British economy has shrunk. By one authoritative estimate, Britain is 4 percent poorer today than if it had stayed in the EU.

Many in the British government are reluctant to acknowledge this reality. Huw Pill, the Bank of England’s chief economist, lamented in a recent podcast interview, “What we’re facing now is that reluctance to accept that, yes, we’re all worse off.”

These costs don’t necessarily make Brexit a “mistake.” Brexit was a trade: less prosperity for more sovereignty. Countries reasonably make such trades all the time. My native Canada would dramatically increase its prosperity if it abandoned its sovereignty and merged with the United States. By their continued independence, Canadians implicitly choose otherwise, and nobody criticizes them for “Canxit.” They know the cost, and they accept the cost as worth it.

[Read: Why Britain’s mayhem was worth it]

But the British were not honestly alerted to the cost of their choice. In 2016, future Prime Minister Boris Johnson campaigned for Brexit in a big red bus carrying a huge printed message: We send the EU £350 million a week. Let’s fund our NHS instead.

The British were promised that Brexit meant more: more resources for public and private consumption. Instead, Brexit has predictably turned out to mean less, and the British are surprised, baffled, and angry.

The British health service is now threatened with waves of strikes by nurses and junior doctors. With the country’s finances in a post-pandemic, post-Brexit mess, the British government has squeezed the pay of health-care providers. Between 2010 and 2022, nurses have suffered a nearly 10 percent decline in their pay after adjusting for inflation; junior doctors have lost much more, according to some estimates. Many have emigrated: One in seven U.K.-trained doctors now works abroad, according to a Financial Times analysis.

Britain is compensating by importing health-care providers from Africa and Asia. Yet this contradicts another central promise of Brexit: less immigration. British immigration numbers are very tangled, partly because Brexit has induced large numbers of EU citizens living in Britain to seek British citizenship. These status changes register in the statistics even if the actual human beings have not moved at all. Still, as best as one can tell, migration into Britain has genuinely accelerated since the end of 2020, driven by asylum seekers from outside Europe and from Ukraine.

The British will vote in a national election probably sometime in 2024. You would think this coming election would be the appropriate time to assess the country’s choices and consider whether to choose a different path. You’d think wrong.

Brexit rearranged British politics in surprising ways. Brexit was backed by the Tory right and the Labour left. The Leave vote was highest in the Labour strongholds of the Midlands and northeastern England; Remain was strong in the affluent areas of London and the Tory south of England. The far left of the Labour party had always disliked the European Union as an impediment to schemes to protect and subsidize British industry from foreign competition. Jeremy Corbyn, then the Labour leader, declined to join then-Prime Minister David Cameron on the Remain side. Indeed, Corbyn has been described by one of his closest political allies as a Brexiteer “in his heart of hearts.”

Corbyn resigned in 2020. His successor as Labour leader, Keir Starmer, campaigned against Brexit in 2016. To win the next election, however, Starmer must recover northern English seats lost to the Conservatives in 2019. And so, even as polls show that a big majority of British voters now regard Brexit as a mistake, Starmer has pledged not to reverse course.   

In a major speech in July 2022, Starmer dismissed criticism of Brexit as “arguments of the past.” He embraced the old Brexit slogan “Take back control” and vowed, “So let me be very clear: With Labour, Britain will not go back into the EU. We will not be joining the single market. We will not be joining a customs union.”

[Read: How Britain falls apart]

But if Britain can’t vote for a new approach to Europe, how does it meet the costs imposed by its present approach to Europe?

The short answer to that is more of the denial that Pill denounced.

In economic terms, Brexit means that British people must work harder and consume less. But Starmer’s 10-point manifesto for 2024 promises more consumption: more spending on health and public services. That would be a difficult-enough promise for today’s Brexit-hobbled British economy. Starmer undertakes to make the future British economy even less efficient than today’s, by joining more spending to more government management of key industries, specifically railways, energy, and public utilities.

Britain is a society of tremendous capabilities: deep political stability and rule of law, a highly educated and skilled population, a world-spanning language, the planet’s most recognized and admired cultural institutions. The whole world will watch the coronation of King Charles III as carried by the BBC, as styled by British designers, as celebrated by British musicians—and as mocked by British comedians. But developing those assets means accurately assessing Britain’s liabilities, and fearlessly developing plans to overcome them. That assessing and planning will require honest communication with Britain’s voters.

The next government of Britain will likely be a Labour government led by Keir Starmer. It fell to Starmer’s greatest Labour predecessor, Clement Attlee, to explain to the British people where they stood after the Second World War. Addressed as public-spirited adults, the British people met the challenge, shouldered the burden, and built new prosperity. They can do it again—if led in the same forthright way.

Senegalese women reflect on the loss of their menfolk, feared dead after attempting the 1,500km boat journey to Europe.

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An operation against the Italian 'Ndrangheta mafia takes place in Germany, Belgium, France, Italy, Portugal and Spain.