Ukraine pummeled Moscow and multiple other Russian regions with more than 140 drones overnight — killing at least one and destroying dozens of homes in one of the biggest attacks on Russian soil since the war started raging, officials said Tuesday.
Russia said it had destroyed at least 20 Ukrainian attack drones as they swarmed over Moscow and 124 more over eight other regions in a huge escalation of the nearly three-year war.
A 46-year-old woman was killed and three others injured in the town of Ramenskoye, just outside the Russian capital, when drones struck two residential buildings and sparked fires, Moscow regional governor Andrei Vorobyov said.
The attack also caused three of Moscow’s four airports to shut down for well over six hours, resulting in nearly 50 flights to be diverted, according to Russia’s civil aviation authority, Rosaviatsia.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov decried the onslaught, saying the latest attacks was another reminder of the real nature of Ukraine’s political leadership, which he claimed was made up of Russia’s enemies.
“There is no way that night time strikes on residential neighborhoods can be associated with military action,” Peskov told reporters.
“The Kyiv regime continues to demonstrate its nature. They are our enemies and we must continue the special military operation to protect ourselves from such actions.”
Ukraine, meanwhile, said its air force had shot down 38 out of 46 Russia-launched drones during an overnight attack.
There was no immediate comment from Kyiv, though, about Tuesday’s attacks on the Russian regions.
The latest drone attacks on Russia damaged several high-rise apartment buildings in the Ramenskoye district, setting flats on fire and sparking widespread evacuations, officials and residents said.
“I looked at the window and saw a ball of fire,” Alexander Li, a resident of the district told Reuters. “The window got blown out by the shockwave.”
“I drew back the curtain and it hit the building right before my eyes, I saw it all,” Georgy, another resident who declined to give his last name, said of the drones buzzing outside his window. “I took my family and we ran outside.”
The Ukrainian onslaught was the second massive drone attack on Russia this month after Kyiv launched its bold incursion into Russia’s Kursk border region last month.
The Russian military said it had intercepted 158 Ukrainian drones over more than a dozen Russian regions back on Sept. 1 in what Russian media described as the biggest Ukrainian drone barrage since the start of the war.
Russia’s Investigative Committee subsequently announced a criminal probe into what it slammed as a terror attack.
Russia itself has hit Ukraine with thousands of missiles and drones in the last two-and-a-half years, killing thousands of civilians, wrecking much of the country’s energy system and damaging commercial and residential properties across the country.
With Post wires
