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Ukraine hit Moscow with nearly 200 drones in its largest-ever attack on the city on Thursday, striking the Russian capital’s largest oil refinery and sending huge plumes of smoke billowing over the city’s south.
Sergei Sobyanin, Moscow’s mayor, said anti-air defences had shot down at least 194 Ukrainian drones on Thursday morning in the third consecutive day of attacks.
The apocalyptic images of flame and smoke engulfing the Russian capital were a remarkable demonstration of Ukraine’s increasing capacity to strike deep behind enemy lines with its largely homegrown long-range drones.
More than four years into President Vladimir Putin’s invasion, the advance of Russian forces on the battlefield has slowed to a crawl, while Ukraine’s strikes are consistently evading Russian defences to hit military and energy infrastructure.
At least 16 people were injured in the strikes, including two children, local authorities said.
Several of the drones struck the Moscow Refinery in Kapotnya on the capital’s south-eastern outskirts, the largest in the metropolitan area. Ukrainian drones had also struck the oil refinery on Tuesday and previously hit it a month earlier.
Videos posted on social media showed the lid of an oil storage tanker shooting hundreds of metres into the air, lifted by a huge explosion underneath, while several other fires burned nearby.
Sobyanin said multiple drones had hit the refinery, adding that emergency services were working to put out the fires.
The drones also struck several residential buildings in southern Moscow and the capital’s suburbs, local authorities said, as well as two of the largest shopping centres in the area.
The strikes on Russian energy infrastructure have significantly affected its fuel production capacity. Russia’s top petrol station chains set limits on how much their customers could buy across the country earlier this week.
Ukraine’s mid-range drone strikes have particularly affected supply lines to the Crimean peninsula and Russian-occupied regions in the south-east, where authorities introduced strict fuel rationing earlier this month.
Moscow’s four airports halted operations, while Aeroflot, Russia’s largest airline group, cancelled 170 flights.
Footage of the attack showed dozens of Ukrainian-built Liutyi and FP-1 long-range drones flown by several Ukrainian drone brigades. Ukraine also used elite units from the security service (SBU) and military intelligence (HUR), according to the country’s General Staff and drones unit.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the Ukrainian attack was a “fully justified response” to Russian bombardments, which have regularly targeted Kyiv in recent weeks and damaged a near 1,000-year-old monastery complex in the Ukrainian capital on Monday.
“If Putin does not want to end this war and wishes to continue it, we will not sit idly by, we will respond,” Zelenskyy said.
The SBU said on Thursday that “each such attack forces Russia to spend additional resources on repairs, strengthening air defence and restructuring logistics”.
Kyiv has used the attacks to put pressure on a Russian leadership keen to insulate Muscovites from the consequences of the war.
“Now that you [Russians] know what’s going on, ask Putin when he is planning to end it,” Ukrainian foreign minister Andriy Sybiha wrote on X.
The attack comes amid a broad intensification of the air war between the two countries and as Russian troops struggle to push forward on the front line. G7 countries gathered in Évian-les-Bains in France vowed to support what they described as “new momentum” in the war by providing Ukraine with more anti-air munitions.
“All of our partners have noted the precision and effectiveness of our mid-range strikes and long-range sanctions,” Zelenskyy wrote on X on Thursday.
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