MOSCOW (AFP) – Russia said yesterday it had downed Ukrainian drones targeting Moscow and the Crimea peninsula, in attacks that damaged two office towers in the capital and briefly shut an international airport.
One drone targeting Moscow was shot down on the city’s outskirts and two others were “suppressed by electronic warfare” and smashed into an office complex early yesterday, the Russian defence ministry said, adding that there were no injuries.
Moscow and its environs, lying about 500 kilometres from the Ukrainian border, had rarely been targeted during the conflict in Ukraine until several drone attacks this year.
The attack reported yesterday is the latest in a series of recent drone assaults – including on the Kremlin and Russian towns near the border with Ukraine – that Moscow has blamed on Kyiv.
The defence ministry called it an “attempted terrorist attack”.
“On the morning of July 30, the Kyiv regime’s attempted terrorist attack with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) on objects in the city of Moscow was thwarted,” it said on Telegram.
“One Ukrainian UAV was destroyed in the air by air defence systems over the territory of the Odintsovo district of Moscow region.Two more drones were suppressed by electronic warfare and, having lost control, crashed on the territory of Moscow-City’s non-residential building complex.”
Moscow-City is a commercial development in the west of the capital.
Its Mayor Sergei Sobyanin posted on Telegram that the “facades of two city office towers were slightly damaged”.
He added that there were “no victims or injured”.
Several windows had been blown out on the corner of the buildings, AFP photos showed, with mangled steel beams visible and documents strewn on the ground below.
Police officers had cordoned off the area.
The TASS state news agency reported that the capital’s Vnukovo airport was “closed for departures and arrivals, flights are redirected to other airports”. Within less than an hour, operations appeared to have returned to normal.
Earlier this month, a volley of drone attacks briefly disrupted air traffic at the same airport, to the city’s southwest.
The defence ministry also said yesterday that 16 Ukrainian drones were destroyed by air defence fire in an overnight attack on Crimea, a peninsula Moscow annexed in 2014.
“Another nine drones were suppressed by means of electronic warfare and, without reaching the target, crashed into the Black Sea,” the ministry said, adding that there were no victims.
