Ukraine fired its largest drone attack on the Moscow region overnight. Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said 450 drones heading for the capital had been shot down in what he called “the most massive” attack. Two people were killed. The assault wounded 20 across the wider Moscow region, striking the city’s main oil refinery and a residential building on the third and final day of Russia’s parliamentary elections.
The dead were a 74-year-old man and a 44-year-old woman, according to regional Governor Andrei Vorobyev. The woman was killed in Sofyino after a drone struck a three-storey residential building. Five others were injured. Two of them were children. The elderly man died when a private house was hit in the Orekhovo-Zuevo district.
Sobyanin called the assault “an attempt to disrupt” the parliamentary election. The Kremlin tightly controls the vote. Critics have dismissed it as neither free, fair, nor transparent. The balloting, Russia’s first wartime parliamentary election, was also being held in the four Ukrainian regions that Moscow illegally annexed after the war began but still does not fully control, and in Crimea, which Russia seized in 2014.
Oil refinery and logistics sites struck
President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed that Kyiv had used a range of missiles and drones, including Ukraine’s domestically made Flamingo and Pelican missiles, to hit what he described as a “key” Russian oil facility and a logistics site in the region. He called the targets “billions of dollars that sustain the war machine.” Ukrainian military officials said three key units at the Moscow Oil Refinery had been damaged. The site supplies more than a third of the Moscow region’s fuel, according to Kyiv’s defence ministry, and some of its petrol, diesel, and aviation fuel go to Russia’s military.
Ukraine’s defence minister said attacking such facilities “directly undermines the enemy’s ability to continue its war of aggression and supply its military formations.” Videos verified by the BBC showed explosions in the night skies above Moscow and a burning warehouse. Sobyanin said a drone had also struck a building near one of the capital’s boulevards.
Wider barrage and civilian toll on both sides
The Moscow assault was part of a still larger barrage. Ukrainian forces fired more than 1,000 drones at Russia overnight, NPR reported, and Russia’s Ministry of Defense said its forces shot down 1,100 Ukrainian drones across the country, over the annexed Crimean peninsula, and over the Black Sea. Moscow’s biggest airport, Sheremetyevo, warned passengers of temporary restrictions overnight. All arrivals and departures at Vnukovo were halted. Restrictions at both airports were lifted by Sunday morning.
On the Ukrainian side, officials said nine people, including three children, were killed in Russian attacks in the Kyiv and Sumy regions on Saturday. A mother and her two small children were killed in the city of Fastiv, in the Kyiv region, according to regional head Tymur Tkachenko. Tkachenko later said a child injured in a separate attack in Vyshhorod, north of Kyiv, had also died in hospital. In the north-eastern Sumy region, four people were killed when a Russian drone hit the car they were travelling in, said local official Oleh Hryhorov.
Zelensky said Russia also struck a monastery in the Kherson region with a drone on Saturday, killing one member of the clergy and injuring four others. Russian state media reported that an election official was among two people killed by a drone attack on a bus in a Moscow-controlled part of Kherson on Sunday, citing the head of Russia’s election commission.
Both Russia and Ukraine have continued to hit energy infrastructure targets in the past week, despite US President Donald Trump claiming on social media that the two sides had agreed not to do so. Trump signed a sanctions bill on Friday. The bill targets Russia’s economy by implementing tariffs on the biggest buyers of Russian oil and gas, including China and India. The legislation gives the US president powers to impose 100% tariffs on major purchasers of Russian energy.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in February 2022, Ukraine has become a global leader in military drone technology, deploying domestically produced long-range drones alongside missiles for strikes deep inside Russia. Kyiv aims to make the Russian public feel the war’s consequences. Putin has shown no signs he intends to stop the invasion. Instead, the two sides have been drawn into an escalating duel of long-range aerial strikes as fighting along the roughly 1,250-kilometer front line has slowed.