More than 60 drones targeted Moscow overnight, the city’s mayor said on Tuesday, marking another major air attack on the Russian capital as Ukraine stepped up its long-range weapons campaign.
The attack also targeted a satellite communications centre. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Friday that the drones conducted reconnaissance and coordinated the activities of Russian forces in Ukraine.
Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, calling it a “large-scale attack”, said in a post on Telegram that air defences had “destroyed 61 drones flying towards Moscow”, without specifying where they had come from.
He said emergency services were working at the accident sites but there were no reports of any casualties.
The attack on Moscow was part of a wider wave of drone attacks across Russia overnight.
The Russian Defence Ministry said air defence forces shot down 419 Ukrainian drones in 18 areas, including the Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula in southern Ukraine.
A small town about 100 miles southeast of the Russian capital,
Moscow region governor Andrey Vorobyov said on his Telegram channel that “a private house caught fire” after a drone crashed in Yegoryevsk, a small town about 100 miles southeast of the Russian capital, killing a 6-month-old baby and injuring three people.
Vorobyov said falling drone debris damaged an administrative building in Dubna, about 69 miles north of Moscow.
The attacks briefly disrupted operations at Moscow’s Domodedovo and Zhukovsky airports, according to Rosaviatsiya, Russia’s federal aviation agency.
Zelenskyy said on X that his forces had attacked the Dubna satellite communications centre in the Moscow region. He said the facility, located about 310 miles from the Ukrainian border, was used to coordinate and conduct reconnaissance of the movements of Russia’s forces in Ukraine.
Additional strikes were to take place. “Relevant actions are also being prepared against other similar enemy facilities,” he said.
The latest Ukrainian attack came less than two weeks after the country struck a major oil refinery in the Moscow region, in what appears to be its biggest air attack on the Russian capital since the full-scale invasion of Moscow in 2022.
Kyiv described the attacks as retaliation for Russian attacks on a historic monastery complex in the Ukrainian capital earlier this month.
Russia’s envoy Rodion Miroshnik, responding to what he calls “crimes of the Kiev regime,” said on Telegram on Tuesday that the number of civilian casualties from Ukrainian attacks has exceeded 300 in a single week for the first time this year. It appeared that he was referring to the total number of killed and injured.
Ukraine has increasingly targeted Russia’s hinterland — a display of its expanded long-range capabilities, intended to project power beyond the battlefield and increase pressure on Moscow to end its war.
The campaign has focused heavily on Russia’s oil and energy infrastructure, disrupting the country’s war machine and putting pressure on fuel supplies.
President Vladimir Putin publicly acknowledged that Russia is facing fuel shortages for the first time on Monday.
In an interview with a state television reporter, Putin said that Ukraine had proposed stopping long-range attacks as a step toward peace but said Russia rejected the proposal and would continue attacks on its battlefield.
