Ukraine targeted Moscow early on Tuesday in what authorities said was its largest ever drone attack on the Russian capital, killing at least one person, sparking fires and forcing the suspension of flights and train travel.
The Russian defence ministry said 337 drones were launched at Russia over Monday night, with 91 of them targeting the Moscow region. The Moscow city mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, said it was the largest Ukrainian drone attack on the city. The governor of the wider region, Andrei Vorobyov, said: “At the moment, one person is known to have died and three were injured.”
Russia’s aviation watchdog said flights were suspended at all four of Moscow’s airports. Two other airports, in the Yaroslavl and Nizhny Novgorod regions east of Moscow, were also closed. Vorobyov said at least seven apartments were damaged and residents forced to evacuate from a multi-storey building in the Ramenskoye district about 50km (31 miles) south-east of the Kremlin.
A train station in the Domodedovo district, about 35km south of Moscow, was damaged, the RIA news agency reported. Russian Telegram channels including Baza, which is close to the security services, posted videos they said were residential fires started by drones. Russian officials and pro-Russian outlets frequently say drones were shot down and their debris damaged housing or facilities – regardless of whether the drones hit their intended military targets.
The strikes came with US and Ukrainian teams due to meet for peace talks in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday as part of the US push for an end to the three-year war that Russia started with its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Governors of Ryazan south-east of the Moscow region and Belgorod on the border with Ukraine also said their regions came under drone attack. Several settlements in the Belgorod region lost power, the regional governor said.
A November 2024 drone attack on Moscow was the largest on the city in the war at that point, with Russia saying 34 UAVs were involved. At least one civilian was killed and dozens of homes wrecked, Russian officials said.
Kyiv says its strikes inside Russia are aimed at destroying infrastructure key to Moscow’s overall war efforts and are in response to Russia’s continued bombing of Ukraine. Both sides deny targeting civilians, but thousands have died, overwhelmingly Ukrainian.
Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Ukraine carried out the attack before a visit of the Organization of Security and Co-operation in Europe’s (OSCE) secretary general to the Russian capital. “This is not the first time that a visit to Moscow by a high-ranking foreign delegation has been accompanied by an attack by Ukrainian armed forces drones,” Zakharova wrote online.
The greater Moscow region, with a population of at least 21 million, is one of the biggest metropolitan areas in Europe, alongside Istanbul.
With Reuters
