A video of Novikov's full briefing is available online, with additional views of the captured drones and associated items and imagery, but the commentary is entirely in Russian.

Novikov said that Russian forces had been able to capture a number of the drones after electronic warfare systems at Khmeimim knocked them out of the sky. Somewhat confusingly, he later said that whoever had built the unmanned aircraft had included systems to specifically to defeat those countermeasures, though.

“Construction of these drones takes significant time period and special knowledge of aerodynamics and radioelectronics,” Novikov. “Assembly and use of these components in the joint system are a complicated engineer task demanding special training, scientific knowledge, and practical experience of producing these aircraft.”

Speaking from the Russian Ministry of Defense’s briefing room, amid examples of the drones and their munitions that the country recovered after the attacks, Major General Alexander Novikov, head of the Russian General Staff's Office for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Development, gave the most detailed and complete official description of the incident to date. He said that unspecified terrorists utilized a total of 13 improvised drones, each carrying 10 bomblets, sending 10 to Russia's Khmeimim air base in Latakia governorate and the other three to its naval base in Tartus on the Mediterranean Sea. The munitions each had an explosive charge weighing nearly one pound, as well as strings of metal ball bearings or BBs glued together as pre-formed shrapnel, which would have made them most effective against individuals out in the open.

The Russian military’s top officer in charge of drone development has offered new details about apparent first of their kind mass drone attacks on its forces in Syria in an official briefing at the country’s Ministry of Defense. The presentation reiterated the Kremlin’s assertion that terrorists or rebels could not have conducted the operation without significant outside support , now implying a possible Ukrainian connection, but significant questions remain unanswered.

Air defense radars aided in detecting the attacks and Pantsir-S1 short-range air defense systems destroyed some of the improvised unmanned aircraft, as well. He added that this was the first time Russian forces in Syria had come under such an attack, though rebels and terrorists have been employing such systems for years now in both that country and neighboring Iraq. The general officer acknowledged that the individual components, such as the apparent lawnmower or moped motors, were available commercially. This is a point the U.S. military has been keen to stress in the aftermath of the attacks. "We have seen this type of commercial UAV technology used to carry out missions by ISIS," Pentagon spokesperson Major Adrian Rankin-Galloway told Russian state outlet Sputnik on Jan. 8, 2018. "Those devices and technologies can easily be obtained in the open market and that is cause for concern." However, Novikov insisted that militants would not have been able to conduct the necessary research and development and flight testing out of their workshops in Syria to make sure the improvised aircraft actually worked without significant assistance. "It is impossible to develop such drones in an improvised manner. They were developed and operated by experts with special skills acquired in countries that produce and apply systems with UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles]," he said, without naming where those individuals might be situated or where the militants might have received such training.

To support these assertions, Novikov focused heavily on the drones’ on-board GPS, which has become an important component of Russia’s allegation that outside actors, including one or more nation states, would have had to have been involved in the attacks at some level. The Major-General said the systems gave them military-grade precision when navigating to Khmeimim and releasing their bombs over the target area. The “pre-programmed coordinates are more accurate than those in the Internet,” Novikov, challenging arguments that militants could have acquired the necessary data via open sources online. Though the briefing included maps of the pre-programmed flight routes, which the Russian Ministry of Defense said it had created using information it downloaded from the examples it captured, he did not provide any actual data to support his claims.

Russian MoD Maps showing the drones flight path during the attack.

In his January 2018 briefing, Novikov also specifically appeared to suggest there might be a connection to Ukraine. He brought up the country when talking about the source of the explosive material inside the bombs the drones dropped on Khmeimim. “The PETN [pentaerythritol tetranitrate] is produces [sic] by a number of countries, including Ukraine at the Shostkinsky Chemical Plant,” he explained. “This explosive material cannot be produced in an improvised manner or extracted from other munitions.”

Russian MoD One of the captured drones showing it carrying eight, rather than the reported 10 bomblets.

Russian MoD A close up of some of the captured bomblets, showing the metal ball shrapnel.

Ukraine is the third country Russia has indirectly implied might have aided the attacks in some fashion. On Jan. 9, 2018, an official statement from the Russian Ministry of Defense, as well as reports from state media outlets, strongly suggested that a U.S. Navy P-8A Poseidon patrol plane flying off the coast of Syria during the attack was somehow involved in the incident. The implication was that the aircraft was feeding targeting information, such as the aforementioned GPS coordinates, or other information to the militants controlling the drones. These aircraft do have a robust electronic support measures suite that can collect information about various emitters, such as enemy radars, but additional electronic and signals intelligence systems have yet to become operational. The idea that the United States is supporting ISIS, who may have been responsible, is a long-standing, but completely unfounded conspiracy theory. The U.S. government and its partners have armed groups opposed to Syrian dictator Bashar Al Assad, though, most notably with TOW anti-tank missiles. Still, there is no actual evidence whatsoever the U.S. military had a role in the attack. Then, on Jan. 10, 2018, the Russians indirectly pointed the finger at Turkey and rebel groups it backs in Northern Syria. The Turkish government is responsible for a so-called “de-escalation zone” in Idlib governorate, which is where the Kremlin says militants launched the drones. In 2017, Russia, Iran, and Turkey agreed to establish the ceasefire areas as part of a controversial plan that seemed aimed at challenging the influence of the United States, its allies, and its local Syrian partners, especially the Kurdish People's Protection Units in the country. According to The Washington Post, Russian officials sent a letter to their Turkish counterparts, not accusing them directly of involvement, but holding them responsible for the Khmeimim attack, blaming them for not being able to maintain the ceasefire in Idlib. Turkey in turn accused Russia and Iran of not keeping up their end of the bargain and demanded that they halt an offensive into the governorate, exposing potential fractures in the partnership.

Ismail Coskun, IHA via AP Turkish troops ride in an armored personnel carrier near the border with Syria in 2016.