Ukraine launched its greatest drone attack on the Russian capital on Tuesday with at least 91 drones targeting Moscow, killing at least one person, triggering fires, closing airports and forcing dozens of flights to be diverted, Russian officials said.
In total, 337 Ukrainian drones were killed on Russia, including 91 in the Moscow region and 126 in the Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces fell, the Ministry of Defense said.
The massive attack on the dawn drone has moved just when a team of Ukrainian officials is preparing to meet an American team in Saudi Arabia to seek possible reasons for peace in the three -year war, and while Russian forces are trying to surround thousands of Ukrainian soldiers in the region of West Kursk.
As the rush hour was built, the mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin, said that the air defenses always postponed attacks against the city, which, with the surrounding region, has a population of at least 21 million and is one of the largest metropolitan regions in Europe.
“The most massive attack on enemy drones (unmanned air vehicles) in Moscow has been postponed,” said Sobyanin in a post on Telegram.
The governor of the Moscow region, Andrei Vorobyov, said that at least two people had been killed and three injured, and he published a photo of an apartment destroyed with his blown windows.
Vorobyov said that some residents had been forced to evacuate a several floor building in the Ramenkoye district of the Moscow region, about 50 km (31 miles) south-east of the Kremlin.
There was no signs of panic in Moscow, the commuters went to work as usual in the center of Moscow.
The Russian aviation watchdog said that thefts had been suspended in the four Moscow airports to ensure air -security after attacks. Two other airports, in the Yaroslavl and Nizhny Novgorod regions, both east of Moscow, were also closed.
Although US President Donald Trump says he wishes to deliver peace to Ukraine, war heats up on the battlefield with a large Russian spring offensive in Kursk and a series of Ukrainian drone attacks deeply in Russia.
Russia has developed a myriad of electronic “umbrellas” on Moscow and on key installations, with additional internal layers on strategic buildings, and a complex network of aerial defenses to shoot drones before reaching the Kremlin in the heart of the capital.
Kyiv, itself the target of repeated mass drone strikes from the Russian forces, tried to recover against its much larger eastern neighbor with repeated drone strikes against oil refineries, aerodromes and even the Russian alert strategic radar stations.
Ukraine has kept a large part of its secrecy of drone program in wartime. CBC’s foreign correspondent, Briar Stewart spoke with Ukrainian soldiers and drone designers to develop high -tech attack drones. The prospect of possible peace talks pushes the two teams at war to try to improve their positions on the battlefield so that they are stronger to negotiate.
The war, the largest in Europe since the Second World War, has combined the grinding of the attrition section of the First World War and the artillery war with the major innovation of drones.
Moscow and kyiv both sought to buy and develop new drones, deploy them in an innovative way and seek new ways to destroy them – to use farmers’ rifles with advanced electronic interference systems.
The two parties have transformed cheap commercial drones into deadly weapons while accelerating their own production.
The soldiers on both sides reported visceral fear of drones – and the two parties used macabre video sequences of fatal drone strikes in their propaganda, with soldiers shown separate in the toilets or from burning vehicles.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, who sought to isolate Moscow from the rigors of war, called on Ukrainian drone attacks that target civil infrastructure such as “terrorism” nuclear power plants and have sworn an answer.
Moscow, by far the richest city in Russia, exploded during the war, supported by the greatest defense expenses since the Cold War.
