Drones Are Downed in Moscow, Disrupting Flights

Russian authorities said they downed five drones targeting western Moscow, including over one of the region’s largest military facilities and near a major airport, fending off an early-morning assault that disrupted civilian flights in and out of the capital.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said air defenses shot down four of the drones and another was grounded through radio-electronic means on Tuesday. No one was injured, the city’s mayor said. 

“The attempt of the Kyiv regime to attack a region where civil infrastructure is located, including an airport that receives, by the way, international flights, is the latest act of terrorism,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wrote on Telegram. She blamed Western powers supporting Kyiv for enabling the attacks.

Ukraine, which rarely claims responsibility for attacks inside Russia or on Russian-held territory, didn’t comment directly on the attack, but Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said Russia had been carrying out state-sponsored terrorism on Ukrainian people since the start of its invasion.

“The Russian Foreign Ministry should realize that a terrorist attack is when you have been deliberately firing cruise and ballistic missiles at residential areas and crowded pizzerias for 16 months,” he said on Twitter.

Tuesday’s assault was the first launched on targets inside Russia since Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin began his aborted rebellion against Moscow’s military top brass. The paramilitary group’s march on Moscow was short lived but exposed deep cracks inside Russia’s security apparatus.

It was also the first to target Moscow since Ukraine largely paused counteroffensive maneuvers late last month in an effort to regroup. 

In May, drones targeted the Kremlin and later that month struck residential areas around the capital, in attacks that Moscow blamed on Ukraine and military analysts described as shaping operations for the offensive that began weeks later.  Ukraine denied involvement.

On Tuesday, flights out of one of Moscow’s largest airports, Vnukovo, were suspended for three hours, with 16 inbound flights diverted to the capital’s other airports, as a result of the attack.

Russian emergency services, cited by state news agency TASS, said one of the drones was downed above military facilities at Kubinka, west of Moscow, known best as home to a Russian Orthodox Church with steps made from melted-down German World War II tanks.

In Moscow, a downed drone caused a fire in an agricultural complex. Authorities said no one was injured. 

“Today another attack by Ukrainian drones was launched on New Moscow and Moscow Province,” the city’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, said of the sprawling southwestern district. “All the drones were destroyed.”

Write to Thomas Grove at [email protected]