Dozens of flats destroyed in the middle of the night, airports paralysed and Explosions startling residents on the outskirts of the cityMoscow heard its war knocking on the door again, like never before. “I looked out of the window and saw a fireball,” Alexander Li, a resident of the Moscow suburbs, told Reuters. “The shockwave blew the window apart.”
Ukraine attacked the Moscow region overnight in its largest drone attack on the Russian capitalkilling at least one woman. High-rise apartment buildings in the Ramenskoye district of the Moscow region were damaged, setting several floors ablaze.
Russia claims to have destroyed At least 20 Ukrainian attack drones as they flew over the Moscow region and 124 more in eight other regions. But images shared on social media show that many have caused serious damage. 144 drones attacking Russia at once is an unprecedented figureeven more so considering that Moscow usually downplays the numbers in these waves of drones.
Two and a half years of invasion have made this war the first one waged by drones. Both Moscow and kyiv have sought to purchase and develop new drones.deploy them in innovative ways and find new ways to destroy them, if possible with cheaper means than the drone itself, which is considerably cheaper than a missile. From the use of shotguns to advanced electronic jamming systems, everything has been put in place to stop these flying devices.
Production
Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said on Tuesday that his country has doubled its weapons production by 2024 and that Ukraine plans to build more than a million drones by the end of the year. It is the first time that a person dies near the capital of Russia as a result of Ukraine’s offensive on Russian soil. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said at least 15 drones were involved in the attack. Al Jazeera reported that 12 people were injured, including two who are in critical condition.
Vladimir Putin has tried to insulate the Russian capital from the rigors of warThe Moscow region, which has a population of more than 21 million, is one of the places where recruitment for the front has been the least widespread, as the regime prefers to build its army in areas where the news has less impact.
In Moscow it sometimes seems that there is no war, only sanctions, but one more night Ukraine interrupted that dream by destroying dozens of houses and forcing the diversion of around 50 flights from airports around MoscowIt is not the West or NATO that is blowing up houses near the capital. It is Ukraine, the country that Vladimir Putin ordered to invade on a large scale in 2022, that is striking back.
What obedient Russian television still calls a special military operation It seems more and more like a warpeering out of some windows or in videos on Telegram accounts. “My friend lives nearby and was woken up at night by an explosion,” Natalia, who has just bought a flat on the outskirts of Moscow, tells EL MUNDO. Her parents live beyond the Urals, where the threat is that you will be called to the front. For ‘new Muscovites’ like her, the risk is that the front will burst into the eighth floor of the block: “Fortunately, my flat faces the other way.”
Russia itself has attacked Ukraine with thousands of missiles and drones in the last two and a half yearskilling thousands of civilians. After realizing that the war would drag on because neither the army surrendered nor the West decided to stay on the sidelines, Russia has focused on decimating the morale of the Ukrainian population itself. who initially said he wanted to protect himself from a Nazi junta. The Russian military has focused its efforts, for another year, on razing civilian infrastructure, destroying much of the country’s energy system and damaging commercial and residential property across the country. The plan is that in Ukraine at some point the cold at home will coincide with bad news at the front, and the civilian population itself will be forced to flee. pressure the Ukrainian government to negotiate.
But the negotiations that Russia has repeatedly talked about cannot take place now, Moscow says. Russian Security Council Secretary Sergei Shoigu has publicly admitted that the Ukrainian incursion on August 6 in Russia’s Kursk region aims to improve kyiv’s negotiating position and divert Russian forces from the Donbas front in eastern Ukraine. So, as he said on state television, as long as Ukrainian forces are on sovereign Russian soil there would be no talks with kyiv.
No to negotiate
Shoigu, who is central to Kremlin policymaking in the Security Council, said that was President Putin’s position. His refusal to negotiate, now that occupied Russian territories are in the balance, comes at a time when Moscow believes it has good prospects for further progress in Donbas. Russia says its forces advanced 1,000 square kilometers in eastern Ukraine in August and September. Despite this Ukrainian incursion into western Russia.
Several sources on the ground say that Russian forces in Donbas advanced in August at their fastest pace in about two years. Russian troops, who have taken about a fifth of Ukraine since invading in February 2022, They continue to advance in eastern Ukraine in an attempt to take over the entire Donbas.
Ukraine’s hope is to contain Russia until the flow of armored vehicles runs out and will also be forced to order another mobilization. And in the meantime, create problems in Russia’s rear. This latest attack follows other waves of drones that Ukraine launched in early September, mainly targeting Russian energy and electrical facilities.
Telegram channels also distributed video footage of a fire that broke out at Zhukovsky Airport near Moscow after an attack by an unmanned aerial vehicle. Moscow Region Governor Andrei Vorobiev reported that Four people were hospitalized in Zhukovsky.
Three Moscow international airports (Vnukovo, Domodedovo and Zhukovsky) suspended landings and takeoffs for part of the night. More than 30 domestic and international flights to Vnukovo and 13 flights to Domodedovo were diverted to other airports, RIA Novosti reports. Flight restrictions were even imposed at Kazan airport in Tatarstan, some 700 kilometers east of Moscow, where two planes had to be diverted to alternate airfields.
Ukraine did not comment on the attack.which came as airstrike alerts sounded in kyiv amid yet another Russian drone attack on the Ukrainian capital.