Ukraine Launches Massive Drone Strike on Russia, Killing Four

At least four people have been killed in a large-scale retaliatory strike by Ukraine on Russia’s regions, including Moscow, Russian authorities have said.

The wave of almost 600 Ukrainian drones struck overnight across 14 Russian regions, as well as the Crimean peninsula and the Black and Azov seas, the Russian defence ministry said on Sunday, with the region around the capital among the worst-hit.

Three people were killed in the Moscow region and one in the Belgorod region, authorities said, as Russian air defences shot down 556 drones overnight and neutralised another 30 after dawn.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said last week that more drone strikes would be launched in retaliation for a deadly three-day Russian attack across Ukraine that killed more than 20 people and injured about 50 others.

Moscow’s regional governor, Andrei Vorobyov, said a woman had been killed when a home was hit in Khimki, north of the capital, in what he described as a “massive” strike on the region, which surrounds but does not include the capital.

Vorobyov said rescuers were still searching the debris for another person. Two men had also been killed in the village of Pogorelki, 10km (6 miles) north of Moscow, after drone debris fell on a construction site, he added, and several residential high-rises and “infrastructure facilities” were damaged.

“Since 3am this morning, air defence forces have been repelling a large-scale UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] attack on the capital region,” Vorobyov said, adding that four people had also been wounded.

In the capital itself, air defence systems intercepted more than 80 drones overnight, the city’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, posted on social media. Twelve people were wounded and “minor damage” was recorded where the debris fell, he said.

One of the strikes wounded construction workers and damaged three houses at a site near Moscow’s oil and gas refinery, Sobyanin said, adding that refinery production had not been disrupted and the “technology” of the refinery had not been affected.

The country’s largest airport – Moscow’s Sheremetyevo – said drone debris had fallen inside its perimeter without causing any damage.

The Moscow region is often attacked by drones but the city itself, about 400km (250 miles) from the border with Ukraine, is less frequently targeted. In Belgorod region bordering Ukraine, one man was killed in a drone attack on a lorry, authorities said.

Zelenskyy posted on social media on Friday that Ukraine was “entirely justified” in striking Russia’s oil industry and military production facilities to hamper Moscow’s war effort, as well as hitting “those directly responsible for committing war crimes against Ukraine and Ukrainians”.

Russia, whose full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, launched more than 1,500 drones and dozens of missiles in the consecutive waves of attacks across Ukraine on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, Ukrainian officials said.

A cruise missile hit a nine-storey apartment block in Kyiv on Thursday, killing 24 people, including three children.

Ukraine’s air force said on Sunday it had intercepted a further 279 Russian drones overnight, out of a total of 287 launched.

Moscow and Kyiv have returned to trading attacks since the end last Tuesday of a three-day truce – which both sides accused the other of violating – to mark the anniversary of victory over Nazi Germany in the second world war.

Diplomatic efforts to end the four-year-old conflict are at a standstill, with Kyiv unwilling to accept Moscow’s maximalist demands for territory in the eastern Donbas region and US attention turned to the US-Israeli war against Iran.

With Agence France-Presse and Reuters