MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian air defences repelled a massive Ukrainian drone attack overnight, intercepting and destroying 121 drones targeting 13 regions, including Moscow, Russia’s Defence Ministry said on Friday, making no mention of casualties or damage.
The ministry said six drones had been destroyed over the Moscow region and one over the capital itself, while other drones had targeted other regions, including those that border Ukraine and Kursk, where Ukrainian troops hold a chunk of land despite Russian efforts to eject them.
Twenty drones had also targeted the Ryazan region, southeast of Moscow, the ministry said, and channels on the Telegram messaging app posted unverified videos of what bloggers there described as large blazes in the city. They said an oil storage depot and a power station had been hit.
Reuters could not confirm those reports.
Pavel Malkov, the Ryazan regional governor, said on Telegram that emergency services were tackling the aftermath of an air attack. Emergency crews had extinguished a fire after drone debris had damaged a house, he added.
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said early on Friday that air defences had intercepted attacks by Ukrainian drones at four locations around the Russian capital.
Sobyanin, writing on Telegram, said air defences southeast of the capital in Kolomna and Ramenskoye had repelled “enemy” drones, without specifying how many.
“At the site where fragments fell, no damage or casualties occurred,” Sobyanin wrote. “Specialist emergency crews are at the site.”
Sobyanin said two drones also headed for Moscow had been downed by air defences in Podolsk, south of the capital, and he reported a single drone downed in Troitsky, southwest of the capital and in Shchyolkovo, to the northeast.
Russian news agencies quoted Rosaviatsiya, the federal aviation agency, as saying two Moscow airports, Vnukovo and Domodedovo, were handling flights after suspending operations for a time. Six flights were redirected to other airports.
In the city of Kursk, Mayor Igor Kutsak said the overnight attack had damaged power lines and cut off electricity to one city district.
The Defence Ministry statement said drones had also been destroyed over the border regions of Bryansk and Belgorod and the Russian-annexed Crimean Peninsula. It said the Saratov, Rostov, Voronezh, Tula, Oryol, and Lipetsk regions had also been targeted.
(Reporting by Reuters; Writing by Andrew Osborn and Ronald Poleski; Editing by Jamie Freed, Diane Craft and Gerry Doyle)
