By Guy Faulconbridge and Lidia Kelly
MOSCOW (Reuters) -Ukraine attacked Moscow on Wednesday with at least 11 drones shot down by air defences in what Russian officials said was one of the biggest drone strikes on the capital since the war in Ukraine began in February 2022.
The war, largely a grinding artillery and drone battle across the fields, forests and villages of eastern Ukraine, escalated on Aug. 6 when Ukraine sent thousands of soldiers into Russia’s western Kursk region.
For months, Ukraine has also fought an increasingly damaging drone war against the refineries and airfields of the world’s second largest oil exporter, though major drone attacks on the Moscow region – with a population of over 21 million – are rarer.
Russia’s defence ministry said it destroyed a total of 45 drones over Russian territory, including 11 over the Moscow region, 23 over the border region of Bryansk, six over the Belgorod region, three over the Kaluga region and two over the Kursk region.
Some of the drones were destroyed over the city of Podolsk, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said. The city in the Moscow region is some 38 kms (24 miles) south of the Kremlin.
“This is one of the largest attempts to attack Moscow using drones ever,” Sobyanin said on the Telegram messaging app in the early hours of Wednesday.
“The layered defence of Moscow that was created made it possible to successfully repel all the attacks from the enemy UAVs.”
The attack comes as Russia is advancing in eastern Ukraine, where it controls about 18% of the territory, and battling to repel Ukraine’s incursion into the Kursk region, the biggest foreign attack on Russian territory since World War Two.
Russian media showed unverified footage of drones whirring over the dawn sky of the Moscow region and then being shot down in a ball of flame by air defences.
Moscow’s airports Vnukovo, Domodedovo and Zhukovsky limited flights for four hours but were restarted normal operations from 0330 GMT, Russia’s aviation watchdog said.
Sobyanin said that according to preliminary information, there were no injuries or damage reported in the aftermath of the attacks. There were also no casualties or damage reported in the aftermath of the attack on Bryansk in Russia’s southwest, the governor of the region Alexander Bogomaz wrote on Telegram.
Russia’s RIA state news agency reported that two drones were destroyed over the Tula region, which borders the Moscow region to its north. Vasily Golubev, governor of the Rostov region in Russia’s southwest, said air defence forces destroyed a Ukraine-launched missile over the region, with no injuries reported.
The Russia defence ministry did not mention neither Tula nor Rostov in its statement listing destroyed Ukrainian air weapons. Ukraine’s military said on Wednesday it overnight struck an S-300 anti-aircraft missile system based in Rostov region.
Reuters could not independently verify the reports.
The drone attack on Moscow is on a par with the May 2023 attack when at least eight drones were destroyed over the capital in an attack President Vladimir Putin said was Kyiv’s attempt to scare and provoke Russia.
In Kursk, Russian war bloggers said that intense battles were ongoing along the front in the region where Ukraine has carved out at least 450 square km (175 square miles) of Russian territory.
(Reporting by Lidia Kelly in Melbourne and Guy Faulconbridge in Moscow; Editing by Michael Perry)
