By Guy Faulconbridge and Lidia Kelly
MOSCOW (Reuters) – Ukraine attacked Moscow on Sunday with at least 32 drones, the largest drone strike on the Russian capital since the war began in 2022, forcing flights to be diverted from three of the country’s main airports. city and injuring at least one person.
Russian air defenses shot down 32 drones flying toward Moscow over the Ramenskoye and Kolomensky districts of the Moscow region, as well as in the town of Domodedovo, home to one of the city’s largest airports, it said the mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin.
“32 drones flying towards Moscow were destroyed,” Sobyanin said. It reported no major damage, although Russia’s federal air transport agency said Domodedovo, Sheremetyevo and Zhukovo airports had diverted flights.
One person was injured.
Airports have since resumed operations, Russian aviation watchdog Rosaviatsia said.
Moscow and its surrounding region, with a population of at least 21 million, is one of the largest metropolitan areas in Europe, along with Istanbul.
The Ramenskoye district, about 45 km southeast of the Kremlin, was last targeted in September in what was then the largest Ukrainian attack on the Russian capital, when Russian air defense units destroyed 20 drones.
An unverified video posted on Russian Telegram channels showed drones buzzing across the horizon. Russian officials have reported several Ukrainian drone attacks in other regions, including the Kaluga, Bryansk and Orlov regions.
The two-and-a-half-year-old war in Ukraine is entering what some officials say could be its final act after Moscow’s forces advanced at the fastest pace since the war’s early days and Donald Trump was elected 47th President of the United States. .
Trump, who takes office in January, said during his election campaign that he could bring peace to Ukraine within 24 hours, but gave few details on how he would seek to do so.
When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy called Trump to congratulate him on his victory in the presidential election, Tesla CEO and Trump supporter Elon Musk joined the call, according to media reports. Musk owns SpaceX, which provides Starlink satellite communications services critical to Ukraine’s defense effort.
THE UMBRELLAS OF MOSCOW
kyiv, itself the target of repeated massive drone strikes by Russian forces, has attempted to retaliate against its much larger eastern neighbor with repeated drone strikes against oil refineries, airfields and even strategic radar stations. Russian early warning system.
While the 1,000 km (620 mile) front largely resembled the trench and artillery warfare of World War I for much of the war, one of the conflict’s greatest innovations was war drones.
Both Moscow and kyiv have sought to purchase and develop new drones, deploy them in innovative ways, and find new ways to destroy them – from the use of agricultural shotguns to advanced electronic jamming systems .
Moscow has developed a series of electronic “umbrellas” above Moscow, with additional advanced internal layers above strategic buildings and a complex network of air defenses that shoot down drones before they reach the Kremlin, at heart of the Russian capital.
Both sides have turned cheap commercial drones into deadly weapons while increasing their own production. Soldiers on both sides have expressed a visceral fear of drones – and both sides have used grisly video footage of deadly drone strikes in their propaganda.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has sought to protect Moscow from the rigors of war, has called Ukrainian drone attacks targeting civilian infrastructure such as nuclear power plants “terrorism” and promised a response.
Moscow, by far Russia’s richest city, boomed during the war, buoyed by the biggest defense spending spree since the Cold War.
There were no signs of panic on Moscow’s boulevards. Muscovites walked their dogs as bells from onion-domed Russian Orthodox churches rang across the capital.
(Reporting by Lidia Kelly in Melbourne and Guy Faulconbridge in Moscow; editing by William Mallard and Tomasz Janowski)
