Russian officials claimed to have repelled Wednesday a major Ukrainian drone attack on the capital Moscow, shooting down at least 11 drones.
The attack, the largest since the war broke out in 2022, will mark another escalation since Aug. 6 when Ukraine sent thousands of soldiers into Russia’s western Kursk region.
For months, Ukraine has also fought an increasingly damaging drone war against the refineries and airfields of the world’s second-largest oil exporter, though major drone attacks on the Moscow region – with a population of over 21 million – are rarer.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said it destroyed a total of 45 drones over Russian territory, including 11 over the Moscow region, 23 over the border region of Bryansk, six over the Belgorod region, three over the Kaluga region and two over the Kursk region.
Some of the drones were destroyed over the city of Podolsk, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said. The city in the Moscow region is some 38 kilometers (24 miles) south of the Kremlin.
“This is one of the largest attempts to attack Moscow using drones ever,” Sobyanin said on the Telegram messaging app in the early hours of Wednesday.
“The layered defense of Moscow that was created made it possible to successfully repel all the attacks from the enemy UAVs.”
The attack comes as Russia is advancing in eastern Ukraine, where it controls about 18% of the territory and battling to repel Ukraine’s incursion into the Kursk region, the biggest foreign attack on Russian territory since World War II.
Russian media showed unverified footage of drones whirring over the dawn sky of the Moscow region and then being shot down in a ball of flame by air defenses.
Moscow’s airports Vnukovo, Domodedovo and Zhukovsky limited flights for four hours but restarted normal operations from 3:30 a.m. GMT, Russia’s aviation watchdog said.
Sobyanin said that according to preliminary information, there were no injuries or damage reported in the aftermath of the attacks. There were also no casualties or damage reported in the aftermath of the attack on Bryansk in Russia’s southwest, the governor of the region Alexander Bogomaz wrote on Telegram.
Russia’s RIA state news agency reported that two drones were destroyed over the Tula region, which borders the Moscow region to its north. Vasily Golubev, governor of the Rostov region in Russia’s southwest, said air defense forces destroyed a Ukraine-launched missile over the region, with no injuries reported.
The Russian Defence Ministry did not mention either Tula or Rostov in its statement listing destroyed Ukrainian air weapons. Ukraine’s military said on Wednesday it overnight struck an S-300 anti-aircraft missile system based in Rostov region.
Reuters could not independently verify the reports.
The drone attack on Moscow is on par with the May 2023 attack when at least eight drones were destroyed over the capital in an attack President Vladimir Putin said was Kyiv’s attempt to scare and provoke Russia.
In Kursk, Russian war bloggers said that intense battles were ongoing along the front in the region where Ukraine claims to carved out at least 1,000 square kilometers of Russian territory.
