An explosion of a drone is seen in the sky over the city during a Russian drone strike, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Nov. 25, 2023.Gleb Garanich | Reuters
Russian authorities on Sunday claimed that Ukraine tried to attack Moscow with dozens of drones overnight, just a day after Russia launched its most intense drone attack on Kyiv since the beginning of its full-scale war in 2022, according to Ukrainian officials.
Russian air defenses brought down at least 24 drones over the Moscow region — which surrounds but does not include the capital — and four other provinces to the south and west, the Russian Defense Ministry and Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin reported in a series of Telegram updates. Neither referenced any casualties.
Andrei Vorobyev, governor of the Moscow region, wrote on Telegram that the drone strikes damaged three unspecified buildings there, adding that no one was hurt.
Russian Telegram channels reported that one drone crashed into a 12-story apartment block in the western Russian city of Tula, about 180 kilometers (113 miles) south of Moscow, injuring one resident and frightening others.
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Moscow's Vnukovo and Domodedovo airports also briefly shut down because of the drone attack, according to Russia's state-run news agency Tass. Both appeared to have resumed normal operation by 6 a.m. local time, according to data from international flight tracking portals.
Russian Telegram channels speculated that Ukrainian forces had deployed a previously unseen type of drone in the purported strike, pointing out some similarities to the Iranian-made weapons Moscow routinely employs in its attacks on Ukraine.
The Russian capital has come under attack from drones regularly since May, with Russian officials blaming Ukraine. Military analysts commented at the time that the early attacks deployed Ukrainian locally-made drones which could not carry as heavy a payload as the Iranian-made Shaheds.
As of late morning Sunday, Ukrainian officials did not acknowledge or comment on the strikes, which came a day after Russia targeted the Ukrainian capital with over 60 Iranian-made Shahed drones. At least five civilians were wounded in the hourslong assault, which saw several buildings damaged by falling debris from downed drones, including a kindergarten. The wounded included an 11-year-old child, according to Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko.
The attack was “the most massive air attack by drones on Kyiv” in the war so far, Serhii Popko, head of the Kyiv city administration, said on Saturday. Ukrainian air force spokesman, Yurii Ihnat, confirmed later that same day that air defenses shot down 66 air targets over the Ukrainian capital and surrounding region throughout the morning.
The attack on Kyiv was carried out on the morning of Holodomor Memorial Day, which commemorates the man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine that killed millions of Ukrainians from 1932 to 1933. It is marked on the fourth Saturday in November.
The Ukrainian air force early on Sunday said it had brought down eight of nine Iranian-made Shahed drones fired overnight by Russian forces.
Also on Sunday morning, the Russian Defense Ministry reported that two Soviet-made S-200 rockets fired by Kyiv were shot down over the sea of Azov, which stretches between Crimea and Ukraine's Russian-occupied southeastern coast.
According to local news sources, air raid sirens sounded shortly earlier in Russian-annexed Crimea, which on Friday came under what Russian officials called one of the biggest drone attacks since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year. There were no reports of casualties and no comment from officials in Kyiv.
Elsewhere, parts of Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine were left without power following a nighttime Ukrainian strike on a thermal power plant in the Donetsk region, a Moscow-installed local official reported on Telegram Sunday. According to Denis Pushilin, who heads the province Russia illegally annexed last year, the attack on the Starobesheve plant took out the electricity in parts of the occupied cities of Donetsk and Mariupol, along with other nearby areas.
On the outskirts of Donetsk, Russian troops have continued their attempts to advance near Avdiivka, the eastern town that has been a Ukrainian stronghold and fighting hotspot since the early days of the war, according to reports by the Ukrainian General Staff and analysis by the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War.
The Ukrainian General Staff on Sunday morning said Kyiv's forces over the previous 24 hours beat back Russian assaults to the northeast, west and southwest of Avdiivka, as Moscow's troops strain to encircle the city.
Several Russian bloggers also made unconfirmed claims that Ukrainian forces had begun withdrawing from the industrial zone on Avdiivka's southern flank, although others said that Russian troops lacked complete control of the area. These claims could not be independently verified.
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