MOSCOW: Ukraine launched its biggest drone attack on the Russian capital on Tuesday (Mar 11) with at least 91 drones targeting Moscow, killing at least two people, sparking fires, closing airports and forcing dozens of flights to be diverted, Russian officials said.
A total of 337 Ukrainian drones were downed over Russia, including 91 over the Moscow region and 126 over the Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces have been pulling back, the defence ministry said.
The massive dawn drone attack unfurled just as a team of Ukrainian officials prepared to meet a United States team in Saudi Arabia to seek grounds for possible peace talks in the three-year-old war, and as Russian forces try to encircle thousands of Ukrainian soldiers in the western Russian region of Kursk.
As rush hour built, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said air defences were still repelling attacks on the city, which along with the surrounding region has a population of at least 21 million and is one of the biggest metropolitan areas in Europe.
“The most massive attack of enemy UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) on Moscow has been repelled,” Sobyanin said in a post on Telegram.
Moscow Region Governor Andrei Vorobyov said at least one person was killed and three injured, and he posted a picture of a wrecked apartment with its windows blown out.
Vorobyov said that some residents were forced to evacuate a multi-storey building in the Ramenskoye district of the Moscow region, about 50km southeast of the Kremlin.
There was no sign of panic in Moscow, commuters went to work as normal in central Moscow.
Russia’s aviation watchdog said flights were suspended at all four of Moscow’s airports to ensure air safety after the attacks. Two other airports, in the Yaroslavl and Nizhny Novgorod regions, both east of Moscow, were also closed.
