Three Ukrainian drones early yesterday attacked Moscow, Russian authorities said, injuring one person and prompting a temporary closure of traffic in and out of one of four airports around the Russian capital.
It was the fourth such attempt at a strike on the capital region this month and the third this week, fueling concerns about Moscow’s vulnerability to attacks as Russia’s war in Ukraine drags into its 18th month.
The Russian Ministry of Defense referred to the incident as an “attempted terrorist attack by the Kyiv regime” and said that three drones targeted the city.
Photo: Reuters
One was shot down in the surrounding Moscow region by air defense systems and two were jammed. Those two crashed into Moscow’s business district.
Photographs from the site of the crash showed the facade of a skyscraper damaged on one floor.
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said the attack “insignificantly damaged” the outsides of two buildings in the district.
A security guard was injured, Russia’s state news agency TASS reported, citing emergency officials.
No flights went into or out of Vnukovo International Airport on the southern outskirts of the city for about an hour, and the airspace over Moscow and the outlying regions was temporarily closed to all aircraft, TASS said. Those restrictions have since been lifted.
Moscow authorities have also closed a street to traffic near the site of the crash in the Moscow City area.
Without directly acknowledging that Ukraine was behind the attack on Moscow, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian Air Force said that Russians were seeing the consequences of Moscow’s war in Ukraine.
“All of the people who think the war ‘doesn’t concern them,’ it’s already touching them,” air force spokesman Yurii Ihnat told reporters yesterday.
“There’s already a certain mood in Russia that something is flying in, and loudly,” he said. “There’s no discussion of peace or calm in the Russian interior any more. They got what they wanted.”
Ihnat also referenced a drone attack on Russian-occupied Crimea overnight.
Moscow yesterday said that it had shot down 16 Ukrainian drones and neutralized eight more with an electronic jamming system. There were no casualties, officials said.
In Ukraine, the air force reported that it had destroyed four Russian drones above the country’s Kherson and Dnipropetrovsk regions. Information on the attacks could not be independently verified.
Meanwhile, two people were killed and 20 wounded by a Russian missile strike late on Saturday evening on Sumy in northeast Ukraine.
A four-story building belonging to a vocational college was hit, the Ukrainian Ministry of the Interior said.
Local authorities said that dormitories and teaching buildings were damaged in the blast and the fire that followed.
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