Barrage of drones targets Moscow, Russian border regions
Summary
The attack was one of the biggest on Russian territory since the beginning of the Ukraine war. At least one woman died, according to authorities.
A wave of drones targeted Russia overnight, including Moscow, in one of the largest such attacks on Russia’s territory since the start of its war with Ukraine.
The Russian Defense Ministry said Tuesday it had shot down 144 drones, almost half of them in the western border region of Bryansk, as well as across Moscow and the Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces have staged an incursion in recent weeks.
At least one woman died and three people were hospitalized, according to Russian authorities, after residential buildings in a Moscow suburb caught alight during the assault, which also forced the temporary closure of three of the capital’s airports. There was no immediate comment from Kyiv.
The mass drone assault appeared to mark an escalation of a recent push by Kyiv to take the war deep inside Russia, including Moscow where residents have been largely insulated from the effects of armed conflict, now in its third year.
Last month, Ukrainian forces swept across the border into Russia’s Kursk region—the first foreign invasion of Russian territory since World War II. The incursion dealt a humiliating blow to President Vladimir Putin, putting his manpower-stretched military in a bind and forcing the evacuation of 130,000 civilians from more than 400 square miles of Russian territory.
A few days later, Kyiv fired more than 150 drones at oil refineries and power plants across much of Russia, in what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said was part of a strategy to conclude the conflict by making the Russian public feel the war the same way Ukrainians do.
Despite the recent Ukrainian salvos, which have punctured Putin’s aura of invincibility and rattled many Russians, the Kremlin leader has sought to portray a business-as-usual attitude. End-of-summer activities have continued largely as normal in the Russian capital. An increased level of repression and laws to crush all opposition to the war make it difficult to accurately gauge public sentiment about the conflict.
Video aired on Russian state television Tuesday showed flames bursting through the upper-floor windows of a multistory residential apartment building in Moscow’s Ramenskoye region, around 30 miles from the Kremlin.
A spokesman for Russia’s aviation authority, Rosaviatsia, said on the Telegram messaging app that Moscow’s Domodedovo, Zhukovsky and Vnukovo airports had resumed operations after dozens of flights had earlier been grounded.
“Night strikes on residential areas cannot be associated with military operations," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Tuesday. “The Kyiv regime continues to demonstrate its true nature. These are enemies. We must continue the military operation in order to protect ourselves from such manifestations of such a regime."
In Ukraine, opinion polls show that support for some kind of negotiations with Moscow has been creeping upward since Ukraine’s counteroffensive last year failed to retake significant territory—though a majority of Ukrainians still say they want to keep fighting to retake all Russian-occupied land.
