Moscow:
At least one person was killed and three others were injured as Ukraine targeted Moscow in a “massive” overnight drone attack on Tuesday. According to Russia’s Defence Ministry, as many as 337 drones were launched by Kyiv over Monday night, with 91 of them targeting the Moscow region. The attack, possibly the largest by Ukraine since the start of the war, sparked fires across Moscow, and forced the suspension of train and air travel, authorities said.
The strike on the Russian capital, hundreds of kilometres from the Ukraine border, came ahead of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s meeting with America’s top diplomat Marco Rubio in Saudi Arabia aimed at ending the three-year war and restoring support from its key benefactor, which under President Donald Trump has demanded concessions to end the three-year war.
Kyiv Strikes Moscow
Russia’s defense ministry said its military downed a total of 337 Ukrainian drones, including 91 over the Moscow region and 126 over the Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces have been pulling back. Russia’s Investigative Committee has reportedly opened a terrorism case in response to the massive drone attack.
The Moscow city mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, in a Telegram post said it was the largest Ukrainian drone attack on the city. As rush hour built, he said air defences were still repelling attacks on the city, which along with the surrounding region has a population of at least 21 million and is one of the biggest metropolitan areas in Europe.
“The most massive attack of enemy UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) on Moscow has been repelled,” Sobyanin said in a post on Telegram.
Moscow Region Governor Andrei Vorobyov said at least one person was killed and three injured, and he posted a picture of a wrecked apartment with its windows blown out. He added that drone debris damaged at least seven units in a residential building in another suburb in the southeast. He also informed that a few residents were forced to evacuate a multi-storey building in the Ramenskoye district of the Moscow region, about 50 km (31 miles) southeast of the Kremlin.
Russia’s aviation watchdog said flights were suspended at all four of Moscow’s airports to ensure air safety after the attacks. Two other airports, in the Yaroslavl and Nizhny Novgorod regions, both east of Moscow, were also closed.
The RIA news agency reported that a train station in the Domodedovo district, about 35km south of Moscow, was also damaged in the strike. Damage to railway tracks from drone attacks was also reported in the Moscow region, leading to the cancellation of some commuter trains.
Despite the massive attack, a report by news agency Reuters said there was no sign of panic in Moscow, where commuters went to work as normal in the central part of the city.
Russian state-controlled international news television network RT posted videos showing residential fires started by drones.
US Ukraine Talks
The massive dawn drone attack unfurled just as a team of Ukrainian officials prepared to meet a US team in Saudi Arabia to seek grounds for possible peace talks in the three-year-old war, and as Russian forces try to encircle thousands of Ukrainian soldiers in the western Russian region of Kursk.
The talks in Saudi Arabia will be the most senior since a disastrous White House meeting last month, when Trump berated Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky for purported ingratitude. Since Trump’s dressing down of Zelensky, Washington has suspended military aid to Ukraine as well as intelligence sharing and access to satellite imagery in a bid to force it to the negotiating table.
Though Trump said he wants to deliver peace in Ukraine, the war is heating up on the battlefield with a major Russian spring offensive in Kursk and a series of Ukrainian drone attacks deep into Russia.
Drone War
The war, the biggest in Europe since World War Two, has combined grinding World War One style attrition trench and artillery warfare with the major innovation of drones. Moscow and Kyiv have both sought to buy and develop new drones, deploy them in innovative ways, and seek new ways to destroy them – from using farmers’ shotguns to advanced electronic jamming systems.
Russia has developed a myriad of electronic “umbrellas” over Moscow and over key installations, with additional advanced internal layers over strategic buildings, and a complex web of air defences to shoot down the drones before they reach the Kremlin in the heart of the capital.
Kyiv, itself the target of repeated mass drone strikes from Russian forces, has tried to strike back against its vastly larger eastern neighbour with repeated drone strikes against oil refineries, airfields and even Russian strategic early-warning radar stations.