Ukrainian forces kept up their bombardment of Moscow overnight, with the city’s mayor, Sergey Sobyanin, announcing on Monday morning that 84 Ukrainian drones had been intercepted by the capital’s air defences.
Following an apparent Ukrainian hack on Sunday evening, dozens of messages reading simply “MOSCOW WILL BURN” appeared on one of Sobyanin’s personal Telegram channels, along with a link to a campaign raising funds to buy drones for the Ukrainian Armed Forces. The Telegram channel was shut down shortly afterwards.
While little information on the scale of the damage caused by the fresh round of Ukrainian strikes on the Russian capital has been shared by the authorities, restrictions on incoming and outgoing flights were imposed at the city’s Sheremetyevo, Vnukovo, Domodedovo and Zhukovsky airports, though they had been lifted by Monday morning.
Residents of the Moscow region’s Odintsovo and Istra districts told Novaya Europe that they had heard explosions in the middle of the night. “I was woken up at 3:50am by a loud bang somewhere nearby, … thought it was a thunderstorm, and then there was another bang right next to me — the windows shook,” said Olga, a resident of Zvenigorod, a town to the west of Moscow.
According to the Russian Defence Ministry, Russian air defences shot down around 300 incoming Ukrainian attack drones overnight. In the city of Shchekino, in the country’s central Tula region, a drone struck a high-rise apartment block, the region’s governor, Dmitry Milyaev, said on Telegram.
The audacious Ukrainian strikes on the Russian capital, which has become an increasingly frequent target for Kyiv in recent months, follow an unprecedented attack on Moscow’s largest oil refinery last week, which blew the roof of one of its storage units off and started multiple fires that covered the city in palls of acrid black smoke for days afterwards.
