Russia announced on Tuesday the death of a woman following a Ukrainian drone strike on a residential building in the Moscow region, which is rarely hit by such attacks.
In eastern Ukraine, where Russian troops continue to advance, Moscow claimed in the morning the capture of the town of Krasnogorivka, which was long a stronghold in the Donetsk region, as well as three other villages.
Several hundred kilometers from the front, a 46-year-old woman died after a drone hit a residential building in Ramenskoye, on the southeastern outskirts of the Russian capital, Moscow Region Governor Andrei Vorobiov announced on Telegram.
He also said that three people were injured and taken to hospital.
The Russian capital and surrounding region have been the target of several drone attacks since the Kremlin’s large-scale offensive in Ukraine in February 2022. But this is the first time that one of them has been fatal.
kyiv is carrying out these strikes in response to Russian bombings that have been devastating its territory for more than two and a half years and killing civilians there almost daily.
On Monday night, the Russian military said on Telegram that it had shot down a total of 144 Ukrainian drones, including 20 over the Moscow region.
– “A terrible thing” –
In front of the damaged building on Tuesday morning, a few people were looking at the damage, some of them visibly in shock, according to an AFP journalist on the scene.
The strike caused a fire that was quickly brought under control by firefighters on the 10th floor and left a gaping black hole.
Dmitri, 52, lives in the building. He says he heard a “powerful explosion” and then tried to flee with his family when thick smoke filled his stairwell. Fearing he would die of suffocation, he waited for the firefighters to arrive.
The drone hit “about three or four meters from our house,” he said. “A terrible thing passed very close to us.”
“I think that (drones) will come again, that it will not stop there… In Kursk, it started and it has already reached us,” says Lyubov Sbrodova, a resident of a nearby building, referring to this Russian border region targeted by a Ukrainian offensive.
“Our authorities are not doing everything they need to do to ensure the security of our city,” complains this 33-year-old manager, who says she was woken up at four in the morning by a first loud explosion.
On Telegram, the governor of the region claimed to have visited the site. According to him, about fifty apartments were damaged and debris from the drone that fell to the ground still needs to be “cleared”.
Flights at several airports have been disrupted. Earlier this morning, a spokesman for the civil aviation agency said that restrictions at Moscow’s Vnukovo, Domodedovo and Zhukovsky airports had been lifted.
– Capture of a Ukrainian city –
On the front, despite the surprise cross-border attack launched by kyiv on August 6 in the Kursk region, Moscow is steadily gaining ground in the Ukrainian region of Donetsk (east), which remains the epicenter of the fighting.
On Tuesday, the Russian Defense Ministry claimed control of three villages and the town of Krasnogorivka, which was long a stronghold of the Ukrainian army, about 20 kilometers west of Donetsk.
Krasnogorivka, which had a population of around 16,000 before the conflict, had become more vulnerable since the beginning of the year with the fall of Marinka and Avdiivka, two other nearby towns.
The Russian army regularly claims to have captured small villages, but it is rarer for this to concern towns.
Former Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, who was dismissed in May 2024, said that the Ukrainian offensive in Kursk was aimed at “forcing” Moscow to negotiate and redeploy troops fighting in eastern Ukraine, but that this plan had failed.
“We have enough forces, we continue to attack” in the Donetsk region, said Mr. Shoigu, now secretary of the Russian Security Council, in an interview with public television broadcast on Tuesday.
On Monday, the Russian military also claimed the capture of another village in the Donetsk region near the town of Pokrovsk, towards which its troops have advanced rapidly in recent weeks.
Pokrovsk, an important logistical hub for Ukrainian troops, has been the target for several weeks of Russian forces superior in both men and weapons.
bur/ktr
Related News :