Ukraine launches 600 drones toward Moscow in major barrage, mayor says
LONDON -- Russian air defenses in the Moscow region shot down at least 201 Ukrainian drones overnight and into Sunday morning, according to a statement from the city's Mayor Sergey Sobyanin, in what appeared to be Ukraine's largest wave of drone attacks on the Russian capital of the war to date.
The 201 drones downed were among around 600 craft that were launched in the direction of Moscow between Saturday evening and early Sunday morning, Sobyanin said in a series of statements posted to Telegram.
Sobyanin did not report any damage or casualties, though said that emergency responders had been deployed to the site of fallen debris.
Moscow's regional Gov. Andrey Vorobyov, though, reported in a post to Telegram that one person was killed in the capital's Ramensky district when a drone fell on a residential property.
Russia's Defense Ministry said its forces downed at least 822 Ukrainian drones overnight. The craft were shot down over 16 Russian regions, occupied Crimea, the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea.
Local officials reported that five people were killed by a drone attack in the Rostov region and that one person was killed in a drone attack on a bus in the Belgorod region.
Ukrainian forces also again targeted facilities belonging to Russia's e-commerce giant Wildberries. The company reported a fire at a warehouse in the city of Podolsk to the south of Moscow.
The Ukrainian missile and drone production company Fire Point said in a post to Telegram that its weapons were used to attack "a Wildberries logistics hub" in Kolyadino in Podolsk.
Russia's federal air transport agency, Rosaviatsiya, reported temporary flight restrictions at airports in Kaluga, Tambov, Gelendzhik and Sochi, as well as at three of Moscow's four international airports -- Vnukovo, Domedodovo and Zhukovsky.
Russia continued its own long-range strike campaign on Ukraine overnight. Ukraine's air force said Russian forces launched several missiles and 106 drones into the country in its latest barrage, of which three missiles and 85 drones were shot down or otherwise suppressed.
Impacts of Russian munitions were reported across 13 locations, the air force said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a post to Telegram that at least six people were injured in the capital Kyiv and across the surrounding region.
Two people were killed by Russian strikes in Zelenskyy's home city of Kryvyi Rih, the president wrote, as was one person in the northeastern city of Sumy. Two more people were killed in the southern Zaporizhzhia region, local officials there said.
"When North Korean ballistic missiles destroy infrastructure and take lives here, in Europe, we cannot allow European interceptors to simply remain in storage," Zelenskyy wrote, in another appeal to foreign partners to bolster Kyiv's thinning stocks of air defense munitions.
"Protecting lives is essential. Russia must be stopped. New aid packages represent, quite literally, lives saved and infrastructure protected every day," Zelenskyy said.
Amid Russia's latest barrage, at least one drone was reported as having crossed into NATO airspace in Romania, from the direction of Moldova. The Defense Ministry in Bucharest said in a statement that the craft was tracked and shot down by a Spanish F-18 fighter jet.
