On Sunday, Russia informed that it had thwarted a major Ukrainian drone attack with at least 20 drones gunned down over Russian regions, including Moscow.
The Defence Ministry of Russia said Ukrainian drones were shot down over regions including Moscow, Tula, Kaluga, and Bryansk. In Tula, one person was injured when an intercepted drone hit an apartment building, said the region’s governor Alexei Dyumin.
“A mass drone attack was attempted overnight,” Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said, reported Reuters. Flights were delayed or cancelled at Moscow’s main airports due to the drone attack, said the Kommersant newspaper.
Meanwhile, on Saturday, Ukraine’s capital suffered what officials said was Russia’s largest drone attack of the war. The attack left five people wounded. At sunrise, the rumble of air defences and explosions woke residents after a week of intensifying attacks.
Over the course of the week, Russia had carried out 911 attacks across the country, said Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba. This killed 19 Ukrainians and wounded 84.
“The enemy is intensifying its attacks, trying to destroy Ukraine and Ukrainians,” he said in a post on the Telegram messaging app. It was doing so deliberately, “just like 90 years ago, when Russia killed millions of our ancestors,” he said.
The Air Force of Ukraine initially said 71 of the 75 drones had been shot down. It later revised the number of downed craft to 74. 66 of those had been downed over Kyiv and the surrounding region, said the Air Force’s spokesperson on television.
Air Force chief Mykola Oleschuk praised the effectiveness of ‘mobile fire’ units. These are fast pickup trucks with a machine gun (or flak cannon mounted on their flatbed). These downed nearly 40% of the drones, said Oleschuk.
(With inputs from Reuters)