Almost 600 Ukrainian drones struck multiple targets across Russia overnight, Russian authorities said, killing four people and causing a number of injuries as air defenses engaged waves of incoming unmanned aircraft.
Russian officials reported three fatalities in the Moscow region and one in Belgorod. Andrei Vorobyev, governor of the Moscow region, said a woman was killed at her home in Khimki northwest of the capital, while two men died in the village of Pogoreliki, about 10 km north of Moscow. The mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin, said at least 12 people were wounded in the city — most of them construction workers at a site near an oil and gas refinery — but that refinery production was not disrupted. Authorities in the Belgorod region said a man was killed when a drone struck a truck.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said its forces shot down 556 drones overnight and intercepted another 30 after dawn. State news agency TASS reported that 81 of the incoming drones were headed for Moscow, making this one of the largest attacks on the capital since the full-scale invasion began in February 2022.
The strike came days after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy vowed retaliatory measures following a Russian assault on Kyiv that killed 24 people and injured around 50. Kyiv’s strikes on Russian territory followed a pattern of cross-border attacks and counterstrikes that both sides have traded since the war escalated.
Moscow also continued its barrage over Ukraine: the Russian military sent 287 drones toward Ukrainian territory overnight, Kyiv’s air force said, and reported that 279 of them were shot down or jammed. Ukrainian officials said Russian strikes injured eight people in Dnipropetrovsk region — three in Dnipro, four in Kryvyi Rih and one in Synel’kove.
President Zelenskyy defended the Ukrainian operations on Russian soil as “entirely justified” given Moscow’s ongoing attacks on Ukrainian cities and communities. Posting on X, he emphasized the challenges of hitting targets far from Ukraine’s border and in areas with heavy Russian air defenses: “The distance from Ukraine’s state border is over 500 km. The concentration of Russian air defense in the Moscow region is the highest. But we are overcoming it.” He added a demand that Russia end its war.
Diplomatic efforts to halt the conflict remain stalled. Kyiv has rejected Moscow’s maximalist territorial demands in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas, saying such concessions would reward illegitimate aggression. Attempts by the United States to bring the parties to talks have stalled in recent months, with Washington occupied by the broader regional tensions involving Iran, according to observers cited by Russian and international reporting.
The overnight barrage is the latest escalation in a campaign of long-range drone, missile and air attacks from both sides, highlighting the war’s continued intensity and the limits of existing diplomatic avenues for de-escalation.
Edited by: Dmytro Hubenko