One of Ukraine’s largest drone strikes on Russia has killed at least four people, including three near Moscow, and wounded a dozen others, local authorities say.
Debris fell on Russia’s largest airport without causing damage before Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed the drone strikes on Sunday, saying they were “entirely justified”.
Russia has repeatedly launched similar attacks on Ukraine’s capital and other cities during the war, and an expert said that the strikes appeared to be retaliation for recent Russian attacks on Kyiv.
Russian drone strikes on Ukraine overnight wounded eight people, Ukrainian authorities said.
In Ukraine’s strikes on Russia, a woman was killed after a drone hit her home in Khimki, a Russian city just northwest of Moscow, and two men died in the village of Pogorelki, which is 10 kilometres north of the capital, according to local Governor Andrei Vorobyev.
Ukrainian drones had also damaged unspecified “infrastructure” and several high-rise buildings, Vorobyev said on social media.
One man was killed after a drone struck a truck in the Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine, according to local authorities.
In Moscow itself, at least 12 people were wounded in the night-time strike, mostly near the entrance to the city’s oil refinery, Mayor Sergei Sobyanin reported. Sobyanin reported that the “technology” of the refinery hadn’t been damaged.
Russia’s largest airport — Moscow’s Sheremetyevo — said that drone debris had fallen on its grounds without causing damage or affecting flights.
Russian defences shot down 81 drones headed for Moscow overnight, state agency Tass reported, citing Sobyanin, marking one of the largest attacks on the city since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
Russian air defences destroyed 556 drones over Russia overnight, the country’s defence ministry said Sunday morning.
Shortly after midday local time, it reported that more than 1000 drones had been shot down or jammed in the previous 24 hours.
Zelenskyy said that the drones had flown more than 500 kilometres from Ukrainian territory, and that Ukraine was “overcoming” Russian air defence systems concentrated in and around the capital.
“Our responses to Russia’s prolongation of the war and attacks on our cities and communities are entirely justified. This time, Ukrainian long-distance sanctions have reached the Moscow region, and we are clearly telling the Russians: their state must end its war,” Zelenskyy said.
Nigel Gould Davies, senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London-based think tank, said that Ukraine’s large-scale attack appeared to be “the retaliation or revenge that President Zelenskyy promised after the fierce attacks that Russia carried out on Kyiv.”
Those strikes came immediately after the end of a brief ceasefire that allowed Russia to hold its annual Victory Day parade on May 9 commemorating the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany during World War II.
“It brings home the fact Ukraine has the capacity to strike at very significant scale at or around the Russian capital,” taking the war home to Russians in a way that would be “most unwelcome” to the Kremlin, Gould Davies told The Associated Press.
“There is no ongoing peace process to disrupt. What (the attack) is more likely to do is add to the darkening cloud of anxiety over Russia which has developed palpably over the last three or four months,” he said.
He cited a combination of factors, including Russia’s recent battlefield setbacks, a deteriorating economic situation at home, and the Kremlin’s intensifying crackdown on the internet, including in Moscow and Russia’s second-largest city, St Petersburg.
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