Moscow faced a night of sustained drone strikes that Russian officials say left two people dead on the capital’s outskirts, injured nine others and disrupted air travel across the city.
Overnight, “650 drones were launched toward the Moscow region”, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said on Telegram, adding that “most (were) destroyed by air defences at long range”.
Moscow Region governor Andrei Vorobyov reported that 185 drones were “destroyed or neutralised” overnight across 16 municipalities in the region.
Despite the intercepts, Vorobyov said the attack killed two men, aged 71 and 20, in two separate locations on the outskirts of Moscow, and left nine others injured.
Damage was recorded in multiple communities. Vorobyov said 47 houses across seven municipalities were hit, along with four apartments in a residential building in the village of Lobanovo.
According to the Russian state news agency TASS, the barrage was the second-largest drone attack in the past two years on the Russian capital and its surrounding region, which lies hundreds of kilometres from the Ukrainian border.
The strikes also rippled through Moscow’s transport system. Operations at the city’s four airports were repeatedly interrupted, with air traffic restrictions imposed multiple times overnight and into the morning, the Russian civil aviation agency Rosaviatsia said.
Both Ukraine and Russia have intensified long-range attacks in recent months, hitting civilian and industrial targets such as energy facilities, transport and port infrastructure, as well as ships in the Black Sea.
Russia, which launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, has said it intends to increase strikes on infrastructure targets, including in Kyiv, as winter approaches.
