Drone smashes into Moscow skyscraper owned by Putin crony

A Ukrainian drone crashed into a high-rise tower in Moscow’s business district owned by an associate of Vladimir Putin.

Two suspected Ukrainian drones struck the suburbs of Russia’s capital on Wednesday, while a third damaged a building in the central business district.

The skyscraper, called Moscow Towers, was bought in 2017 by Grigory Bayevsky, a business partner of Putin’s billionaire childhood friend Arkady and Boris Rotenberg.

Mr Bayevsky was revealed in 2016 to have sold or transferred luxury properties to women linked to the Russian president, including his suspected daughter Katerina Tikhonova, gymnast Alina Kabaeva and her elderly grandmother.

The latest assault on Moscow comes after Ukrainian authorities said Russian artillery hit two villages near the eastern Ukraine city of Lyman, killing three people and wounding two others.

The Moscow region, hundreds of kilometres from the front line, has been the subject of repeated attacks in recent weeks, although there have been no reports of major damage.

Air defences downed one Ukrainian drone in Mozhaisky district and one in Khimki district of Moscow region, Russia’s defence ministry claimed.

A third drone crashed into a building in the Moscow City business district around three miles from the Kremlin after being “suppressed” by air defences, it said.

The state TASS news agency reported that glass panes on three floors of the high-rise building had been damaged. Unverified videos on social media showed minor damage from the two other drones which had been destroyed.

Moscow airports briefly closed but have now reopened, Russian state media reported.

Emergency services were inspecting the area in the business district, Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin said on Telegram.

“Several windows were smashed in two adjacent five-storey buildings,” he said.

Mr Sobyanin and the defence ministry said there were no reports of casualties.

In Khimki district, the wreckage of a downed drone had partially collapsed the roof of a private house and damaged a non-residential building, the RIA Novosti news agency reported.

There were no casualties, it reported.

Earlier this week, a Ukrainian drone crashed near the Moscow home of a notorious Kremlin propagandist.

Margarita Simonyan, the head of RT, the Russian state television network, and a prominent cheerleader for the invasion of Ukraine, said on Monday that a drone had landed a few hundred metres from her property in the upmarket Istra district, west of the capital.

Air strikes deep inside Russia have increased since two drones were destroyed over the Kremlin in early May.

Russian officials have repeatedly warned that military drones flying over Moscow, which along with its surrounding region has a population of nearly 22 million people, could cause a major disaster.

In May, a Ukrainian drone hit another prestigious Moscow suburb that is home to several cabinet ministers, and in recent weeks attacks have targeted the city’s financial district, where several ministries and major companies are based.

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