A wave of nearly 600 Ukrainian drones attacked Russia overnight, killing four people, authorities said Sunday, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called the barrage “fully justified” retribution for Moscow’s own crackdown on Ukraine.
Air defenses shot down 556 drones overnight across the country, the Russian defense ministry said, with another 30 captured after dawn in one of Ukraine’s biggest barrages of the ongoing conflict so far.
Zelenskyy said Kiev’s attack on Russia – which came days after a massive drone and missile bombing in the Ukrainian capital killed at least 24 people – was “totally justified”.
“Our responses to Russia’s prolongation of the war and its attacks on our cities and communities are fully justified,” the Ukrainian leader said. has written on social media. “This time, long-range Ukrainian sanctions reached the Moscow region, and we are clearly telling the Russians: their country must end its war.
Saturday night, AFP journalists were given rare access to an undisclosed location from where Ukraine launched its long-range drones in what turned out to be one of Russia’s biggest strikes during the conflict.
Members of the battalion prepared the aircraft-like drones before they took off for Russia, leaving a trail of sparks and flames in their wake.
Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said Moscow and the surrounding region “experienced the largest-scale attack since the start of the full-scale occupation” in February 2022.
Ukraine’s priority “remains the continued build-up in the use of long-range strike capabilities to the fullest extent possible against a wide range of military targets,” said Commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Forces, Robert Brovdi. AFP in a last exclusive interview before the strikes.
In Russia’s capital region, “a woman was killed as a result of a UAV hitting a private house,” Governor Andrey Vorobyov posted on Telegram, adding that the early morning attack also claimed the lives of two men.
One of the victims was an Indian national working in Russia, the Indian embassy in Moscow said in a statement.
Inside the capital, one of the strikes injured construction workers at a job site near an oil and gas refinery, Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said.
“Refinery production has not been interrupted. Three residential buildings were damaged,” he added.
While the capital region is often subject to drone strikes, the city of Moscow, about 400 kilometers from the border with Ukraine, is less frequently targeted.
“The impact was so strong that it almost knocked me (out of bed) and I weigh a lot. I opened the window and saw smoke rising,” said Konstantin, a 39-year-old resident of the area where a high-rise building was damaged in the Putilkovo district outside Moscow. AFP on the page.
In the Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine, one person was killed overnight in a drone attack on a truck, regional authorities said.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainian air force said it had intercepted 279 Russian drones out of a total of 287 launched.
The refinery, the oil depot is hit
Diplomatic efforts to end the conflict have been at a standstill, with Kiev unwilling to accept Moscow’s maximalist demands for territory in the eastern Donbass region, saying it would be tantamount to surrender.
While the United States has pushed for both sides to come to the negotiating table, talks have stalled significantly since Washington’s attention turned to The US-Israel war against Iran at the end of February.
After a three-day truce brokered by the US expired on Tuesday to mark the anniversary of victory over Nazi Germany in World War Two – which both sides accused the other of violating – Moscow and Kiev have returned to trade attacks.
In response to daily bombings by the Russian military for more than four years, Ukraine has regularly struck inside Russia.
Kiev says its long-range strikes target oil processing facilities in an attempt to damage the oil revenues that fund Russia’s war chest.
The latest attack on Sunday first hit “the Moscow oil refinery, the Solnechnogorsk oil depot and several microelectronics production facilities,” Ukraine’s defense ministry said on social media.
Ukraine’s General Staff said among the targets hit was a factory in the Moscow region “which specializes in the production of high-tech products and microchips for high-precision weapons.”
“The war is returning from where it came from,” the ministry added.
The war has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and forced millions from their homes, making it Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War II.
(hmm)
