KYIV, Ukraine
Ukraine attacked Moscow on Wednesday with at least 11 drones shot down by air defenses in what Russian officials said was one of the biggest drones strikes on the capital since the war in Ukraine began 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 over 21 million — are rarer.
Russia’s defense ministry said
it destroyed a total of 45 drones over Russian territory, including 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 some 38 km (24 miles) south of the Kremlin.
“This is one of the largest
attempts to attack Moscow using drones ever,” Sobyanin said on the Telegram
messaging app in the early hours of Wednesday.
“The layered defense of Moscow
that was created made it possible to successfully repel all the attacks from
the enemy UAVs.”
The attack comes as Russia is
advancing in eastern Ukraine, where it controls about 18 percent of the
territory, and battling to repel Ukraine’s incursion into the Kursk region, the
biggest foreign attack on Russian territory since World War Two.
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 Vnukovo,
Domodedovo and Zhukovsky limited flights for four hours but were restarted
normal operations from 0330 GMT, Russia’s aviation watchdog said.
Sobyanin said that according
to preliminary information, there were no injuries or damage reported in the
aftermath of the attacks. There were also no casualties or damage reported in
the aftermath of the attack on Bryansk in Russia’s southwest, the governor of
the region Alexander Bogomaz wrote on Telegram.
Russia’s RIA state news agency
reported that two drones were destroyed over the Tula region, which borders the
Moscow region to its north. Vasily Golubev, governor of the Rostov region in
Russia’s southwest, said air defense forces destroyed a Ukraine-launched
missile over the region, with no injuries reported.
The Russia defense ministry
did not mention neither Tula nor Rostov in its statement listing destroyed
Ukrainian air weapons. Ukraine’s military said on Wednesday it overnight struck
an S-300 anti-aircraft missile system based in Rostov region.
The drone attack on Moscow is
on a par with the May 2023 attack when at least eight drones were destroyed
over the capital in an attack President Vladimir Putin said was Kyiv’s attempt
to scare and provoke Russia.
In Kursk, Russian war bloggers
said that intense battles were ongoing along the front in the region where
Ukraine has carved out at least 450 square km (175 square miles) of Russian
territory.
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