A woman is killed near Moscow as over 140 Ukrainian drones target Russia, officials say

Over 140 Ukrainian drones targeted multiple Russian regions overnight, including Moscow and surrounding areas, killing at least one person, officials said Tuesday, in one of the biggest drone attacks on Russian soil in the two-and-a-half-year war.

A woman died and three people were injured in the town of Ramenskoye, just outside Moscow, where drones hit two multi-storey residential buildings and started fires, Moscow region Gov. Andrei Vorobyov said. Five residential buildings were evacuated due to falling drone debris, Vorobyov said.

The attack also prompted the authorities to temporarily shut down three airports just outside Moscow — Vnukovo, Domodedovo and Zhukovsky. A total of 48 flights were diverted to other airports, according to Russia’s civil aviation authority, Rosaviatsia.

It was the second massive Ukrainian drone attack on Russia this month. On Sept. 1, the Russian military said it intercepted 158 Ukrainian drones over more than a dozen Russian regions in what Russian media described as the biggest Ukrainian drone barrage since the start of the war. Russia’s Investigative Committee announced a criminal investigation into what it described as a terror attack.

Russia, meanwhile, has pummeled Ukraine with missiles, glide bombs and its own drones, killing over 10,000 civilians, according to the United Nations.

Ukraine has invested a lot of effort in developing domestic drone production, extending the drones’ range, payload and uses. It has increasingly used drone blitzes to slow Russia’s war machine, disrupt Russian society and poke the Kremlin.

Ukrainian officials have complained that weapons pledged by the country’s western partners fall short of what the Ukrainian military needs and commonly arrive long after they were promised. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has urged defence companies to increase their output.

On the battlefield’s 1,000-kilometre (600-mile) front line, Ukrainian troops are up against Russia’s larger and better-equipped army. The two sides are especially contesting parts of eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region, fighting over towns and villages that are bombed-out wrecks, while Ukraine last month launched a bold incursion into Russia’s Kursk border region.

In Moscow on Monday night, drone debris fell on a private house on the outskirts of the city, but no one was hurt, Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said. He counted over a dozen drones heading toward Moscow that were shot down by air defences as they were approaching the city.

Overall, Russia’s Defence Ministry said it “intercepted and destroyed” 144 Ukrainian drones over nine Russian regions, including those on the border with Ukraine and those deeper inside Russia.