Ukraine Drones Kill 3 Near Moscow in Oil Refinery Strike
Ukraine carried out one of its largest and deadliest drone attacks on the Moscow region on Saturday, killing at least three people near Moscow and injuring 12 people near an oil refinery. The strike reached a city and surrounding districts that Russian authorities say are usually covered by heavy air defenses.
Russian authorities said one woman died when her home was struck in Khimki, and two people were killed in the village of Pogorelki when a drone reportedly hit a house under construction. A fourth person was killed in the Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine, as Moscow and Kyiv traded accounts of the wider cross-border campaign.
Sergei Sobyanin and Moscow defenses
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said more than 120 drones were intercepted near Moscow on Sunday. Russia’s Defense Ministry said air defense systems intercepted and destroyed 1,000 Ukrainian drones across more than a dozen regions over 24 hours, while debris from intercepted drones fell on the grounds of Sheremetyevo International Airport. Officials said no damage was reported at Sheremetyevo International Airport.
Several residential buildings and infrastructure sites sustained damage, and a major fire broke out in eastern Moscow after heavy drone attacks on the Russian capital. The injured people near the city’s oil refinery were among the clearest civilian tolls in the latest wave of strikes, even as Russian authorities described the damage as limited in some areas because interceptors hit many drones before impact.
Volodymyr Zelensky on long-range strikes
Volodymyr Zelensky said on Sunday that Ukraine’s long-range capabilities are significantly changing the situation and wrote that Ukrainian long-range strikes had reached the Moscow region. In an earlier post, Zelensky said, “reached the Moscow region, and we are clearly telling the Russians: their state must end its war,” and described the concentration of Russian air defense around Moscow as the “highest.”
Zelensky framed the operations as retaliation for recent Russian strikes on Kyiv that killed 24 people earlier in the week after the collapse of a brief cease-fire. Ukraine’s long-range drone campaign has increasingly targeted Russian military and energy infrastructure far from the front lines, and the latest strike pushed that effort into an area around Moscow that Russian residents have largely been shielded from as the war entered its fifth year.
The next pressure point is already visible in the air. Russian authorities have publicly described mass interceptions near Moscow, and Ukrainian leaders are signaling that the reach of their drones will remain part of the wider exchange after the latest strike on the capital region.
