By Constant Méheut
Russia said Wednesday that Moscow had come under a sizable drone attack overnight, as Ukraine presses on with a cross-border offensive far from the capital that has rattled the Kremlin.
Moscow’s mayor, Sergey Sobyanin, said in a statement that 10 Ukrainian attack drones had been destroyed by the city’s air defenses. Russian authorities did not report any damage or casualties. “This is one of the largest ever attempts to attack Moscow with drones,” Sobyanin wrote on social media.
Drone attacks on Moscow, more than 270 miles from the Ukrainian border, are relatively rare. They disrupt the prevailing sense of normalcy in the capital, which has largely remained insulated from the war, including from Ukraine’s recent offensive into Russia’s western Kursk region.
Last year, Russia accused Ukraine of launching drone attacks that targeted the Kremlin and a building housing government ministries.
Russian authorities said they had shot down a total of 45 Ukrainian drones over Russian territory overnight. Ukraine said it had intercepted 50 Russian drones over its territory overnight. Neither claim could be independently verified, and the Ukrainian military did not comment on the reported drone attack on Moscow.
Dual drone assaults away from the front lines have become a feature of the war in Ukraine, with both countries targeting each other’s military complexes and energy infrastructure. Russia, in particular, has hammered Ukrainian civilian centers with barrages of aerial attacks mixing missiles and attack drones.
The Ukrainian cross-border offensive in the Kursk region, the largest foreign incursion on Russian soil since World War II, has brought the war to Russia as never before, forcing more than 120,000 civilians to evacuate their towns and villages and leaving the Kremlin scrambling to send reinforcements to halt the Ukrainian advance.
The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, said Tuesday that Ukraine was continuing to make marginal advances in the Kursk region of Russia. Footage from the battlefield that was geolocated by the Institute shows that Ukrainian troops have entered the outskirts of Korenevo, a small town of about 5,000 people, and pushed into two more villages.
The Institute also reported that the Ukrainian army is targeting pontoons that Russian forces are trying to install across a section of the Seym River, in the Kursk region, following the destruction or damage of three bridges there by Ukrainian strikes. The attacks in the area seem designed to sever supply routes for Russian troops defending the pocket of territory wedged between the river and the Ukrainian border.
Ukrainian officials, including President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, have repeatedly said that one of the ways to force the Kremlin to engage in genuine negotiations is to make Russia feel the impact of the war, including by bringing the fighting to Russian territory.
The Ukrainian offensive, launched about two weeks ago, caught the Russians by surprise and Moscow has since then struggled to mount a coherent response.
On Tuesday, Russia’s interior ministry said the Ukrainian military was connecting to unprotected video surveillance cameras to collect information, according to the Russian Interfax news agency. It recommended that military and law enforcement personnel in Kursk and two nearby regions not use dating apps and that they refrain from opening any hyperlinks in messages received from strangers or from posting videos from roads used by military vehicles.
“The enemy actively uses such resources for the covert collection of information,” it said.
Comments