Ukraine's Massive Drone Strike on Moscow Kills Two — SkimNews
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- Ukraine launched what Al Jazeera's correspondent called the largest single-day drone attack on Russia since the war began, with Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin saying 1,600 drones had been intercepted since Saturday, including 450 targeting the capital.
- Sobyanin reported that a 44-year-old woman and an elderly man were killed in separate strikes, a 21-storey building caught fire forcing 400 evacuations, and a facility at the Moscow oil refinery was damaged.
- Sobyanin accused Ukraine of attempting to disrupt Russia's tightly controlled three-day election, while President Volodymyr Zelenskyy praised the strikes, saying they hit "billions of dollars" worth of Russian oil industry and logistics facilities sustaining the war.
- Russia retaliated with 138 drones across Ukraine overnight; air defences neutralised 101, but a mother and her two three-year-old children died when a drone struck a home in the Kyiv region, with another girl dying in hospital after a separate strike.
- Kyiv region governor Tymur Tkachenko said the region endured more than a day of attacks, with 31 sites damaged across five districts, including 24 sites in the southwestern Fastiv district alone.
- Russia's election commission head said a separate drone strike on a civilian bus in Russian-occupied Kherson killed two people, including an election official.
Why it matters: On Russia's election final day, Sobyanin called the strikes election interference while Zelenskyy framed them as hits on the financial backbone of Russia's war effort. Both sides killed civilians, including three young children in the Kyiv region. The 1,600+ drones intercepted since Saturday marks a dramatic escalation in long-range strikes during the war's fifth year.
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