Ukraine yesterday attacked Moscow with at least 11 drones shot down by air defenses in what Russian officials said was one of the biggest drone strikes on the capital since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
The war, largely a grinding artillery and drone battle across the fields, forests and villages of eastern Ukraine, escalated on Aug. 6 when Ukraine sent thousands of soldiers into Russia’s western Kursk region.
For months, Ukraine has also fought an increasingly damaging drone war against the refineries and airfields of the world’s second-largest oil exporter, though major drone attacks on the Moscow region — with a population of more than 21 million — are rarer.
Photo: Oleg Petrasiuk / Press Service of the 24th King Danylo Separate Mechanized Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces / Reuters
The Russian Ministry of Defense said it destroyed 45 uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) over Russian territory: 11 over the Moscow region, 23 over the border region of Bryansk, six over the Belgorod region, three over the Kaluga region and two over the Kursk region.
Some of the drones were destroyed over the city of Podolsk, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said.
The city in the Moscow region is about 38km south of the Kremlin.
“This is one of the largest attempts to attack Moscow using drones ever,” Sobyanin wrote on Telegram in the early hours yesterday.
“The layered defense of Moscow that was created made it possible to successfully repel all the attacks from the enemy UAVs,” Sobyanin said.
Russian media showed unverified footage of drones whirring over the dawn sky of the Moscow region and then being shot down in a ball of flame by air defenses.
Moscow’s airports limited flights for four hours.
Sobyanin said that according to preliminary information, there were no injuries or damage reported in the aftermath of the attacks.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces have either destroyed or damaged all three of the bridges over the Seym River in western Russia, Russian sources said, as Kyiv’s incursion into western Russia entered its third week.
Kyiv’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region is changing the trajectory of the war and boosting morale among Ukraine’s war-weary population, although the ultimate outcome of the incursion — the first attack on Russia since World War II — remains impossible to predict.
Even as Ukraine hails its success on Russian territory, the Russian push in eastern Ukraine is poised to claim another key center, the city of Pokrovsk.
Ukraine’s attacks on the three bridges over the Seym River in Kursk could potentially trap Russian forces between the river, the Ukrainian advance and the Ukrainian border. Already they appear to be slowing down Russia’s response to the Kursk incursion, which Ukraine launched on Aug. 6.
Over the weekend, the Ukrainian Air Force commander posted two videos of bridges over the Seym being hit, and satellite photographs by Planet Labs PBC analyzed on Tuesday by The Associated Press confirmed that a bridge in the town of Glushkovo had been destroyed.
A Russian military investigator on Monday said that Ukraine had “totally destroyed” one bridge and damaged two others in the area.
The full extent of the damage remained unclear.
“As a result of targeted shelling with the use of rocket and artillery weapons against residential buildings and civilian infrastructure in the Karyzh village ... a third bridge over the Seym River was damaged,” the unnamed representative for Russia’s Investigative Committee said in a video published on the Telegram channel of Russian state TV anchor Vladimir Solovyov.
Additional reporting by AP
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