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Ukraine has unleashed a wave of nearly 600 drones in a massive retaliatory attack on Russia, which has left four people dead.
The attack on Sunday – which comes after a Russian strike on Kyiv killed 24 people and injured around 50 more last week – is Ukraine’s “largest in over a year,” according to Russian state news agency TASS.
Air defences shot down 556 drones overnight and another 30 drones neutralised after dawn, Russia’s defence ministry said.
Three people were killed in the Moscow region and one in the Belgorod region, authorities said.
“A woman was killed as a result of a UAV hitting a private house. One more person is trapped under rubble,” Moscow region’s Governor Andrey Vorobyov posted on Telegram, adding the attack also claimed the lives of two men.
“Since three o’clock in the morning, air defence forces have been repelling a large-scale UAV attack on the capital region,” he said, adding four people were wounded and infrastructure facilities had been targeted.
Within Russia’s capital, local authorities reported that air defence systems had intercepted more than 80 drones overnight, wounding 12 people.
“Minor damage has been recorded at the sites where debris fell,” Mayor Sergei Sobyanin posted on Telegram.
While the capital region is often subjected to drone attacks, the city of Moscow, around 400km from the Ukrainian border, is less frequently targeted.
In the Belgorod region which borders Ukraine, one man was killed overnight in the Shebekino district in a drone attack on a lorry, regional authorities said.
‘Entirely justified’
The strikes come after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky vowed last week to launch retaliatory strikes for a Russian missile strike on a Kyiv apartment building which killed 24 people including three children.
“Ukraine will not allow any of the aggressor’s strikes that take the lives of our people to go unpunished,” he said on Friday.
Mr Zelensky addressed Sunday’s attack in a post on X, sharing footage of a drone flying overheard and thick black smoke filling in the air as authorities try to extinguish a fire at a site in Russia.
“Our responses to Russia’s prolongation of the war and its attacks on our cities and communities are entirely justified. This time, Ukrainian long-range sanctions reached the Moscow region, and we are clearly telling the Russians: their state must end its war,” he wrote in the post alongside the footage.
“The concentration of Russian air defence in the Moscow region is the highest. But we are overcoming it. Glory to Ukraine!”
Diplomatic efforts to end the conflict have been at a standstill, with Kyiv unwilling to accept Moscow’s maximalist demands for territory in the eastern Donbas region.
While the US has pushed for both sides to come to the negotiating table, the talks have noticeably stalled since Washington’s attention turned to the US-Israeli war on Iran in February.
After the expiration of a three-day truce on Tuesday to mark the anniversary of victory over Nazi Germany in World War II – which both sides accused the other of violating – Moscow and Kyiv have returned to trading attacks.
– With AFP
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