Russian authorities say they have launched the largest drone strike on Moscow as Ukraine pushes ahead with a major invasion of Russia’s Kursk region.
The Russian Defense Ministry said on Wednesday that its air defense forces had shot down 11 drones in Moscow and surrounding areas, including some in the city of Podolsk, about 38 kilometers (24 miles) south of the Kremlin.
“This is one of the largest-scale attempts to attack Moscow with drones,” Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said on the Telegram messaging app. He said in an earlier post that no damage or casualties had been reported.
Drone strikes on Moscow are rare. The latest attempt by Ukraine to target the Russian capital appears to have been larger than a previous attack in May 2023, when at least eight drones were shot down.
Wednesday’s bombings were part of a wider offensive against Russia, with the Pentagon saying air defense forces destroyed a total of 45 Ukrainian drones overnight.
The Defense Ministry said that in addition to the 11 drones destroyed in the Moscow region, 23 drones were shot down in the Bryansk border region, six in the Belgorod border region, three in the Kaluga region, which borders the Moscow region to the northeast, and two in the Kursk region, where fighting is taking place.
Russia’s state-run news agency RIA also reported that two drones were destroyed over the Tula region, which borders the Moscow region to the north.
Moscow’s Vnukovo, Domodedovo and Zhukovsky airports were placed under temporary restrictions overnight following the Moscow attacks, but all three airports resumed normal operations late Wednesday.
“If (Ukraine) were to attack a city, how many drones could get through? These cities are all very well protected, especially the capital. So it is not yet clear whether this was a one-off attack by the Ukrainian military command or a diversion,” Al Jazeera’s defense editor Alex Gatopoulos reported from Kiev.
Lightning attack
The drone strikes in Ukraine come as Russia struggles to drive Ukrainian forces out of Kursk, more than two weeks after the surprise invasion.
Since the Ukrainian assault on Kursk on August 6, hundreds of prisoners have been taken and tens of thousands of civilians have been forced to evacuate.
Ukraine currently claims control of the Kursk Territory, an area of 1,263 square kilometers (488 square miles) including 93 settlements.
On Wednesday, the Ukrainian military said it had struck an S-300 air defense missile system located in the Rostov region in southern Russia.
Ukrainian drones also struck an oil storage facility in Rostov on Sunday, starting a massive fire. Hundreds of Russian firefighters were still battling the blaze on Wednesday.
“Is this a sign of a shift in Ukraine’s strategic thinking? They have been very successful in targeting Russia’s industrial capacity to wage war,” Al Jazeera’s Gatopoulos said.
“The Rostov-on-Don oil refinery is still burning after four days, with production at a fraction of what it was before,” he said.
Meanwhile, Russian forces continued their offensive in eastern Ukraine, claiming on Tuesday that they had captured the strategically important logistics hub of Nizhny Novgorod, part of a broader effort to capture the entire Donetsk region.
The Ukrainian military said Wednesday that it had destroyed 50 of the 69 attack drones launched by Russia in nighttime airstrikes. One entered Ukraine from Belarus and another returned to Russia.
The attack also included two ballistic missiles and one cruise missile, the military said, and only the latter was shot down.
Former Russian President and deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council Dmitry Medvedev promised on Wednesday that there would be no talks between the two countries until Ukraine was completely defeated.
“The empty chatter of arbitrators appointed by no one, the talk of a wonderful peace is over,” he said in a Telegram message. “There will be no more negotiations until the enemy is completely defeated.”
