Ukraine launched what Moscow’s mayor described as the largest-ever drone attack on the Russian capital, killing at least two people and damaging a major oil refinery as Russia wrapped up the final day of its parliamentary elections on Sunday.
The overnight barrage marked one of the single largest drone assaults on Russian territory since the war began more than four years ago. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said 450 drones heading for the capital had been shot down in what he called an “unprecedented attack” that was “clearly planned with the aim of disrupting the elections.” Russian state media and officials offered varying totals. Sobyanin said more than 1,600 drones had been intercepted since Saturday, while Russia’s Ministry of Defense claimed its forces shot down 1,100 Ukrainian drones across the country, including over the annexed Crimean peninsula and the Black Sea.
Across the wider Moscow region, the attack killed two people and wounded 20, according to regional Governor Andrei Vorobyov. The dead were a 44-year-old woman killed in Sofyino when a drone struck a three-storey residential building, and a 74-year-old man who died after a private house was hit in the Orekhovo-Zuevo district. Five others were injured in Sofyino. Two of them were children. A fire triggered by a drone crashing into a 21-storey building forced the evacuation of 400 people, Vorobyov said. Videos appeared to show explosions over Moscow.
Sobyanin said a facility at the Moscow Oil Refinery was damaged. Emergency services were on the scene. The refinery has been hit by Ukrainian strikes before. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed that Kyiv had struck a “key” Russian oil facility and a logistics site in the region, calling them “billions of dollars that sustain the war machine.” Writing on social media, Zelensky said Ukraine had used a range of missiles and drones in the attack, including domestically produced Flamingo and Pelican missiles. “Our long-range responses had a very significant impact in the Moscow region last night,” Zelensky posted.
Strikes timed to election’s final day
The attack fell on the third and last day of voting in Russia’s first wartime parliamentary election, balloting that has been virtually devoid of opposition to President Vladimir Putin’s policies and is all but certain to cement the Kremlin’s dominance. Sobyanin accused Ukraine of attempting to interfere with the tightly controlled election. “The enemy failed in this regard,” he said. Russia was also holding the vote in the four Ukrainian regions that Moscow illegally annexed after the war began but still does not fully control, and in Crimea, the peninsula annexed in 2014. Kyiv has denounced the action as illegal.
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 in Ukraine on Sunday, citing the head of Russia’s election commission. Al Jazeera’s Dmitry Medvedenko, reporting from Moscow, said this was among the largest single-day attacks on Russia since the war began. “I have not seen numbers this large in the four and a half years of this conflict, especially in the past six months when Ukrainian attacks have escalated,” he said.
Ukrainian casualties and Russian retaliation
Ukrainian authorities said at least eight people, including three children, were killed in Russian attacks in the Kyiv and Sumy regions on Saturday. A woman and her two three-year-old children died when a Russian drone hit a home in the Fastiv district of the Kyiv region, according to the emergency service. Regional head Tymur Tkachenko said a girl injured in a separate drone strike in Vyshhorod, north of Kyiv, later died in hospital. In the northeastern Sumy region, four people were killed when a Russian drone hit the car they were travelling in, according to top local official Oleh Hryhorov.
Tkachenko said the Kyiv region endured more than a day of attacks, with 31 sites damaged across five districts. The Fastiv district sustained the most damage, with 24 sites hit, including homes, industrial and utility buildings, vehicles, and the grounds of an agricultural enterprise. Ukraine’s air force reported that Russia launched 138 drones of various types across the country overnight, according to the Interfax-Ukraine news agency. Air defences shot down 101 of them. Al Jazeera’s Rory Challands, reporting from Kyiv, said the region has been targeted frequently in recent days. “These strikes have been going on in Kyiv, where you get the air raid sirens going off pretty much around the clock,” he said.
Moscow’s biggest airport, Sheremetyevo, warned passengers of “temporary restrictions” overnight, while all arrivals and departures were halted at Vnukovo airport. Restrictions at both airports were lifted by Sunday morning, though each warned some flights could still be delayed. The strikes came despite US President Donald Trump claiming on social media that the two sides had agreed not to hit energy infrastructure. On Friday, Trump signed a sanctions bill targeting Russia’s economy by implementing tariffs on the biggest buyers of Russian oil and gas, including China and India, giving the US president powers to impose 100% tariffs on major purchasers of Russian energy.
Russia and Ukraine have continued to hit energy infrastructure targets in the past week. Since Russia’s invasion 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 and pressure Putin into negotiating a peace settlement. Putin has shown no signs he intends to stop the invasion. Instead, Moscow and Kyiv have been drawn into an escalating duel of long-range aerial strikes as fighting along the roughly 1,250-kilometer front line has slowed, restricted by large numbers of drones and ground robots threatening troop movements.