One of Ukraine’s largest drone strikes on Russia killed at least four people and wounded about a dozen others, with impacts reported near Moscow and in the Russian capital on Sunday, according to local authorities cited by the Associated Press. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed the attacks and said they were “entirely justified,” framing the strike as part of a broader response to Russian attacks on Ukraine’s cities and communities.
Moscow region officials said debris from the drones fell on Russia’s largest airport, Sheremetyevo, but did not cause damage or affect flights. In the Moscow area, Gov. Andrei Vorobyev said a woman was killed after a drone hit her home in Khimki, a city northwest of Moscow, while two men died in the village of Pogorelki, about 10 kilometers north of the capital. Vorobyev also said drones damaged unspecified “infrastructure” and several high-rise buildings, and he did not provide additional details on the sites struck.
Elsewhere in Russia, local authorities said one man was killed after a drone struck a truck in the Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine. In Moscow itself, Mayor Sergei Sobyanin reported that at least 12 people were wounded in the nighttime strike, mostly near the entrance to the city’s oil refinery, and said the refinery’s “technology” was not damaged. Hours later, the Indian Embassy in Moscow said an Indian worker died in a drone strike “in (the) Moscow region,” and that three other Indian nationals were hospitalized with injuries, while it was not immediately clear whether the worker was among the people Russia’s Moscow-region officials previously reported dead.
Zelenskyy said the drones flew more than 500 kilometers (310 miles) from Ukrainian territory and said Ukraine was “overcoming” Russian air-defense systems concentrated in and around the capital. In his remarks, he said Ukraine’s “responses to Russia’s prolongation of the war and attacks on our cities and communities are entirely justified,” adding that “this time, Ukrainian long-distance sanctions have reached the Moscow region,” and telling Russians that “their state must end its war.”
Russia said its defenses shot down 81 drones headed for Moscow overnight, with the state agency Tass citing Sobyanin. The Russian Defense Ministry also said it destroyed 556 drones over Russia, the occupied Crimean Peninsula and the Azov and Black Seas, and later reported that more than 1,000 drones were shot down or jammed in the previous 24 hours. Russia’s accounts were presented alongside reports of debris impacts and casualties described by Russian and local officials.
Nigel Gould Davies, a senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said Ukraine’s large-scale attack appeared to be retaliation for the fierce Russian strikes on Kyiv that followed the end of a brief ceasefire around Victory Day. Gould Davies said the attack “brings home the fact Ukraine has the capacity to strike at very significant scale at or around the Russian capital,” describing it as “most unwelcome” to the Kremlin, and he said he expected it to contribute to what he described as “a darkening cloud of anxiety over Russia” rather than prompt near-term changes toward peace talks.
The AP report also said Russia and Ukraine accused each other of repeatedly violating the pause in hostilities after the brief ceasefire. Gould Davies cited a combination of factors that, in his view, have weighed on the Kremlin, including Russia’s recent battlefield setbacks, a deteriorating economic situation at home, and what he described as intensifying Kremlin efforts to crackdown on the internet, including in Moscow and St. Petersburg. He said that while the strikes were likely to intensify concerns among people in Moscow, he saw no prospect in the shorter term that the factors together would induce Russia to consider compromises needed for negotiations.
The same reporting described drone and missile activity in Ukraine during the night, saying Russia attacked with 287 drones overnight into Sunday and that Ukraine’s air force reported 279 were shot down or jammed. Ukrainian authorities said the strikes wounded eight people in Ukraine’s central Dnipropetrovsk region, including three in Dnipro and four in Kryvyi Rih, Zelenskyy’s hometown, as well as one in the district of Synelkove, and that residential buildings were damaged across all three locations.