Ukraine launched more than 1,000 drones towards Russia overnight, including hundreds aimed at Moscow, in what the capital’s mayor described as the largest such attack on the city since the war began.
Russian officials said the barrage came as the country concluded its first wartime parliamentary election. Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin said 450 drones had been destroyed on their way to the capital, but that the Moscow Oil Refinery and a residential building were damaged.
Andrei Vorobyov, governor of the wider Moscow region, said two people had been killed and 20 wounded. The dead were identified as a 74-year-old man and a 44-year-old woman.
Russia’s Ministry of Defence said its forces had shot down 1,110 Ukrainian drones across the country, as well as over Crimea and the Black Sea. The figures could not be independently verified from the information available.
Mr Sobyanin said the attack was intended to disrupt voting. “The enemy failed in this regard,” he wrote on social media, describing the assault as “unprecedented”.
Ukraine says strikes targeted Russian war infrastructure
Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine had used a combination of missiles and drones to strike oil and logistics facilities. He said the operation included the domestically produced Flamingo and Pelican missiles.
“These are billions of dollars that sustain the war machine,” the Ukrainian president said, referring to the economic pressure Kyiv hopes to place on Moscow.
Russia’s parliamentary vote was held across three days and was virtually devoid of opposition to Vladimir Putin’s policies. Balloting also took place in four Ukrainian regions annexed by Moscow after the invasion, despite Russia not fully controlling them, as well as in Crimea, which it annexed in 2014.
Kyiv has condemned the elections in the occupied territories as illegal. Ukraine has increasingly used domestically produced long-range drones and missiles to strike deep inside Russia, while fighting along the roughly 1,250-kilometre front line has slowed amid the widespread use of drones and ground robots.
Ukraine also reported casualties from Russian attacks. Mr Zelenskyy said a Russian drone strike on a monastery in the Kherson region had killed a member of the clergy and wounded four people.
In a separate attack on Kyiv, two children and their mother were killed on Saturday evening, according to Tymur Tkachenko, head of the Kyiv regional state administration. He later said another child wounded in the strike had died in hospital.
