Ukraine Intensifies Drone Attacks on Russia

Ukrainian drones struck Moscow for a second time this week and forced the closure of a key airport, while unmanned boats attacked Russian merchant ships as well as naval vessels in the Black Sea, Russian authorities said Tuesday.

Vnukovo, one of Moscow’s four main airports, was closed following the attack. A skyscraper that hosts private and government offices was also attacked, Moscow’s mayor’s office said.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said unmanned Ukrainian naval drones were destroyed while trying to sink Russian civilian transport ships en route to the Bosporus in the southwestern Black Sea, as well as Russian warships patrolling waters off the coast of Crimea.  

It wasn’t possible to independently confirm the Defense Ministry’s statement, which has issued inaccurate claims in the past.

Ukraine and Russia have traded accusations that their merchant ships have been used to smuggle weapons as the Black Sea takes on a growing significance to each country’s war effort.

The Ukrainian government hasn’t directly commented on the claims. Following the earlier drone attack on Sunday that targeted the same Moscow high-rise, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said the war was returning to Russia, a process he deemed “inevitable, natural and absolutely fair.”

The unmanned aerial vehicles managed to reach the Moskva-City business district despite stringent aerial defenses and antidrone measures that were put in place late last year. These defenses were fortified after the Kremlin itself, the official seat of President Vladimir Putin, was targeted on May 3.

Two drones were destroyed and one crashed inside Moscow after being targeted by electronic jamming equipment, Russia’s Ministry of Defense said Tuesday. No one was hurt in the attack, it added.

After Moscow’s Mayor Sergei Sobyanin

“Everything’s getting sickening already,” someone posted under the name Lena Tarasova.

Another person, Anna Venyaminova, complained that it was impossible to access the bomb shelter or the basement in her building.

“People are asleep without knowing what is happening over their heads,” she wrote.

Many users on the site complained that there weren’t any sirens warning of attacks and there wasn’t any guidance on what to do in the event of one.

The Kremlin sought to play down Tuesday’s attack, with presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov telling reporters that the threat of drone strikes on sites in Moscow obviously exists. “Measures are being taken,” he said and directed requests for further comments to Russia’s Defense Ministry.

The drones are most likely being launched by an intelligence network operating within Russia, said Leonid Slutsky,

“It is time to cover the decision-making centers with a flurry of fire in order to burn out the Nazi infection forever,” Slutsky said on the Telegram social network. He called for immediate retributions in Ukraine, which is frequently labeled as a Nazi state in Russia, a throwback to Moscow’s conflict with Nazi Germany in World War II.

A separate attack by Ukrainian forces on Tuesday hit residential buildings and infrastructure in Russia’s Bryansk district near the border with Ukraine, the local governor, Alexander Bogomaz, said.

The drone attacks on Moscow, which is located less than 300 miles from the Ukrainian border, have been gradually intensifying in recent months. Experts say Ukraine is trying to increase the psychological pressure on Moscow by bringing the war home to Russians, who have been largely supportive of the invasion. 

“This is a Ukrainian approach that we’ve seen before; Delivering a message to the Russians that war is near, in the hope that it will have a demoralizing effect and cause domestic troubles for Putin with more people questioning the war,” said Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin.

“The ability to strike deep inside enemy lines is remarkable,” he said. “However, so far we don’t see any domestic political reaction in Russia that would favor Ukrainian aims, since the Russian society is repressed and atomized.”

Russia continued its missile onslaught across Ukraine on Tuesday, with rockets hitting a dormitory in the eastern city of Kharkiv on the night between Monday and Tuesday, according to local authorities.

On Monday, a Russian missile killed six people, including a girl aged 10, and injured dozens in the central city of Kryviy Rih, Zelensky’s birthplace.

Write to Bojan Pancevski at [email protected]