There's a sequence of events in Tom Clancy's Sum of all Fears (the book, I forget how in depth the movie goes into it.)
The plot of the book is that a group of terrorists are trying to goad the United States and Soviet Union into full scale thermonuclear war. The initial setup is setting up a massive, multi-stage nuclear, very high yeild weapon built out of a rebuilt Israeli weapon lost and presumed destroyed during the Yom Kipper War, to go off at the Super Bowl in Denver. The idea being nobody would think anyone but a major nuclear power with an advanced nuclear weapons program would be capable of this kind of in size and scale nuclear weapon, it would be seen as far too large and complicated to be an improvised terrorist nuclear weapon, leaving the US with no choice but to come to the conclusion that the Soviets were the source of, it not the direct firer of, the weapon.
However the design, while far beyond what the major players in the novel would expect out of a terrorist group, is not perfect (the terrorists kill their bomb maker before he completes some seemingly minor but important last minute steps which leaves the second stage core of the weapon with Helium-3 poisoning, preventing it from reaching full fission) and the bomb fizzles badly, resulting in a much, much smaller nuclear detonation that while still massively destructive isn't the large scale strategic nuclear explosion level results they were hoping for.
However for the first few hours of the crisis the United States is relying on satellite imaging of Denver for all its data on the explosion and what amounts to a trick of the light essentially, the amount of snow on the ground and quartz gravel in a large parking lot built for the Super Bowl were flash-vaporized in the explosion, creating a double-flash that was far brighter than what one would expect from an explosion of this size and exactly what one would expect to see from a large multi-stage nuclear explosion, so for the first few hours of the crisis the United States IS operating under the assumption that the blast was so big it could have only come from a large, first strike strategic nuclear weapon, so they, even though the terrorist screw up, still wind up coming to the exact conclusion the terrorist wanted them to, that the only possible source was a Soviet strategic weapon.
In other words bad agents can be good at making you come to the exact wrong conclusions they want.
If someone who's not the Ukraine, Russia doing it as a false flag, or NATO does manage to pull of a major attack somewhere on this whole playing field, we need to think now about how we would recognize it and how we would react.
They are people not in this conflict who still have skin in the game.
Now is this relevant to this incident? No probably not, this is probably Russia shooting themselves in the foot for sympathy points, but still, food for thought.
Like this actually got brought up by scientist after the Cuban Missile Crises. Really think about it. What would have happened in a small meteor strike happened on let's say October 27th, 1962, somewhere in the United States, Soviet, or satellite/closely aligned state territories? Really think about how bad a reasonable, non-worst case scenario could have really gone.
