The overnight assault saw a woman killed when a drone hit her home in Khimki, a city just northwest of Moscow, and two men died in the village of Pogorelki, 10 kilometers north of the capital, Moscow region governor Andrei Vorobyev said. Another man was killed when a drone struck a truck in the Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine, local authorities there reported.
In the capital itself, at least 12 people were wounded, most near the entrance to the city’s oil refinery, Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin said. He reported that the “technology” of the refinery was not damaged.
Hours later, the Indian Embassy in Moscow reported that an Indian national died in the drone strike and three other Indian workers were hospitalized, though it wasn’t immediately clear whether the fatality was among the three deaths confirmed by regional officials.
President Zelenskyy, in a statement, said the drones had flown more than 500 kilometers from Ukrainian territory and that Ukraine was “overcoming” Russian air defense systems concentrated around Moscow. “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,” he said.
Nigel Gould Davies, senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said the strike appeared to be “the retaliation or revenge that President Zelenskyy promised after the fierce attacks that Russia carried out on Kyiv” immediately after the end of a brief ceasefire that allowed Russia to hold its Victory Day parade on May 9.
“It brings home the fact Ukraine has the capacity to strike at very significant scale at or around the Russian capital,” Gould Davies said, “taking the war home to Russians in a way that would be ‘most unwelcome’ to the Kremlin.”
He added, “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.”
Gould Davies 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 St. Petersburg.
“I see no prospect though, in the shorter term, that even these factors together will induce Russia to consider the compromises that will be necessary for peace negotiations,” he said.
In the same overnight period, Russia launched 287 drones at Ukraine, 279 of which were shot down or jammed, the Ukrainian air force reported. The strikes wounded eight people in Ukraine’s central Dnipropetrovsk region: three in the regional capital of Dnipro, four in President Zelenskyy’s home city of Kryvyi Rih, and one in the Synelkove district, Ukraine’s state emergency service said. Residential buildings were damaged in all three locations.
The attack is part of a broader Ukrainian campaign using long-range drones to strike Russian oil facilities, sending plumes of smoke visible from orbit and bringing toxic rain to Black Sea resort towns. The campaign aims to slash Moscow’s oil export revenues, a key funder of the invasion.
The economic impact remains uncertain, however, as a rise in global oil prices linked to the Iran war and a related easing of U.S. sanctions have helped replenish the Kremlin’s coffers. But the range of the strikes and their environmental effects are bringing the war home to ordinary Russians far from the front lines.