More than 60 drones targeted Moscow overnight, the city’s mayor said Tuesday, marking another major aerial attack on the Russian capital as Ukraine intensifies its long-range weapons campaign.
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A satellite communications center was hit, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on X, adding that it was used for reconnaissance and for coordinating the activities of Russia’s forces in Ukraine.
Describing it as a “large-scale attack,” Mayor Sergey Sobyanin said in a post on Telegram that air defenses had “destroyed 61 drones approaching Moscow,” without specifying where they had come from.
Emergency services were working at crash sites but did not report any casualties, he said.
The assault on Moscow was part of a broader overnight wave of drone attacks across Russia. The Russian Defense Ministry said air defenses shot down 419 Ukrainian drones over 18 regions, including the Russian-annexed Crimean Peninsula off southern Ukraine.
Andrey Vorobyov, the governor of the Moscow region, said on his own Telegram channel that a 6-month-old died and three people were injured when “a private house caught fire” after a drone crashed into it in Yegoryevsk, a small town around 100 miles to the southeast of the Russian capital.
Vorobyov said an administrative building in Dubna, about 69 miles north of Moscow, was damaged by falling drone debris.
The attacks also briefly disrupted operations at Moscow’s Domodedovo and Zhukovsky airports, according to Russia’s federal aviation agency, Rosaviatsiya.
Zelenskyy said on X that his military struck the Dubna satellite communications center in the Moscow region. He added that the facility which sits around 310 miles from the Ukrainian border was used for reconnaissance and for coordinating the activities of Russia’s forces in Ukraine.
Additional strikes were to follow. “Relevant actions are also being prepared against other similar enemy facilities,” he said.
The latest Ukrainian barrage came less than two weeks after the country hit a major oil refinery in the Moscow region in what appeared to be its largest aerial assault on the Russian capital since Moscow’s full-scale invasion in 2022.
Kyiv described those strikes as retaliation for Russian attacks on a historic monastery complex in Ukrainian capital earlier this month.
Rodion Miroshnik, Russia’s envoy for what it calls the “crimes of the Kyiv regime,” said on Telegram Tuesday that the number of civilian casualties from Ukrainian attacks had exceeded 300 people in a single week for the first time this year. He appeared to be referring to a total number of killed and injured.
Ukraine has increasingly targeted sites deep inside Russia — a showcase of its expanded long-range capabilities, aimed to project strength beyond the battlefield and increase pressure on Moscow to end its war.
The campaign has focused heavily on Russia’s oil and energy infrastructure, disrupting the country’s war machine and straining fuel supplies.
President Vladimir Putin publicly acknowledged that Russia is facing fuel shortages for the first time Monday.
In an interview with a state television reporter, Putin said Ukraine had proposed a mutual halt to long-range strikes as a step toward peace, but said Russia rejected the offer and would continue pressing its battlefield offensive.