AT least five people have been killed after Ukraine launched what Russian officials described as one of the largest drone barrages of the war, sending waves of unmanned aircraft towards Moscow and several other regions overnight.
The Indian embassy in Russia said one Indian worker was killed and three others were injured during the drone attacks in the Moscow region. Moscow region’s Governor Andrei Vorobyov added that a woman was killed after a drone slammed into a house in Khimki, north of Moscow. Vorobyov added that apartment buildings and infrastructure sites were damaged in the attacks.
Rescue workers were searching the rubble for another possible victim, while two other men were killed in the village of Pogorelki in the Mytishchi district, he said. Another person died in Belgorod, near the Ukrainian border.
Russia’s Ministry of Defence said it intercepted 556 drones overnight and into Sunday morning, with another 30 drones shot down after dawn. The ministry said the interceptions took place across 14 Russian regions, as well as annexed Crimea and over the Black and Azov seas, in one of the largest Ukrainian aerial assaults of the conflict so far.
Sheremetyevo airport, Moscow’s largest, said drone debris had fallen on its grounds but caused no damage.
Ukraine’s security service, the SBU, later said Ukrainian forces had struck an oil refinery and two oil-pumping stations in the Moscow region.
“Strikes on defence industry facilities, military infrastructure and oil logistics sites reduce the enemy’s ability to continue its war against Ukraine,” the SBU said in a statement posted on Telegram. “These attacks show that even the heavily protected Moscow region is not safe.”
The attacks came after United States President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, suggested the war could be nearing an end. Trump said last week he believed Moscow and Kyiv would “soon reach a deal” to stop the fighting.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky defended the strikes, calling them “entirely justified” and saying they were a response to continuing Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities.
“Our responses to Russia’s prolongation of the war and its attacks on our cities and communities are entirely justified,” Zelensky said. “This time, Ukrainian long-range capabilities reached the Moscow region, and we are clearly telling the Russians: their state must end its war.”
Ukraine’s defence ministry said Moscow and the surrounding region had experienced the largest-scale attack since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian officials said Russian attacks continued in parts of Ukraine. In the Kharkiv region, authorities said Russian forces targeted 15 settlements over the past 24 hours, wounding seven people.
In the southern Kherson region, officials said a 36-year-old man was killed after a Russian drone dropped explosives on the village of Inhulets in Kherson on Saturday morning.