At least 11 drones from Ukraine targeted Moscow on Wednesday, but the strikes were shot down by air defenses. Russian officials described this as one of the largest drone attacks on the capital since the start of the war in Ukraine in February 2022.
The war intensified on August 6 when Ukraine deployed thousands of soldiers across the border into Russia’s western Kursk area. Up until then, the conflict had mostly been a grueling artillery and drone warfare across the fields, forests, and villages of eastern Ukraine.
Russia, the second-largest oil exporter in the world, has been the target of an increasingly destructive drone war that Ukraine has waged for months against its refineries and airfields; nevertheless, significant drone assaults on the Moscow region, home to more than 21 million people, have been less frequent.
45 drones were shot down over Russian territory, according to its defense ministry. Of these, 11 were shot down over the Moscow region, 23 over the Bryansk border region, 6 over the Belgorod region, 3 over the Kaluga region, and 2 over the Kursk region.
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin claimed that several of the drones were shot down over the city of Podolsk which is about 38 kilometers (24 miles) to the south of the Kremlin in the Moscow region.
“This is one of the biggest drone attacks on Moscow ever,” Sobyanin stated early on Wednesday morning on the messaging app Telegram. “The layered defence of Moscow that was created made it possible to successfully repel all the attacks from the enemy UAVs.”
When President Vladimir Putin met Chinese Premier Li Qiang in the Kremlin, the capital’s cafés, restaurants, and shops—which have been carefully shielded from the war—were packed along the boulevards of Moscow. There were few signs of alarm.
