This is a drone attack on an unprecedented scale on Moscow. The Russian Defense Ministry announced on Telegram that it “foiled an attempted terrorist attack by the Kyiv regime”, by destroying a total of 70 drones in the morning, including 34 in the Moscow region. The rest were shot in the regions bordering the capital, namely Kaluga (7) and Tula (2), and in three border regions of Ukraine, those of Bryansk (14), Oriol (7) and Kursk (6 ).
Describing on Telegram a “massive attack”, the governor of the Moscow region Andreï Vorobiov affirmed that the interceptions took place in particular above the towns of Ramenskoye and Domodedovo, around forty kilometers southeast of the center of Moscow and near airports. This operation in the suburbs of Moscow comes four days after a major Russian drone attack on the Ukrainian capital, targeted almost daily for a month.
Kyiv says it is carrying out its strikes on Russia, which usually mainly target energy sites, in response to the deadly Russian bombings which have destroyed its infrastructure and devastated its cities since Vladimir Putin launched the large-scale assault on Ukraine. in February 2022. President Zelensky announced this Sunday that his country had suffered a “record” attack by 145 Russian drones overnight.
Ukrainian troops struggling
Russia, for its part, says it shoots down Ukrainian drones almost daily over its territory, but they rarely target the Russian capital, located some 500 kilometers from the Ukrainian border.
On Sunday, a 52-year-old woman was injured by shrapnel, burned to the face, neck and hands, and two houses were set on fire, said Governor Andrei Vorobiov. Russian air authorities suspended flights departing and arriving from three airports in the capital for almost two hours: Sheremetyevo, Domodedovo and Zhukovsky. Located southeast of the capital, the last two are near the places where drones were shot down.
On September 10, Russian authorities announced the death of a woman during a Ukrainian strike that hit a residential building in the town of Ramenskoye, southeast of Moscow. In August, the Russian capital suffered “one of the most important” attacks from Ukraine with around twenty drones intercepted, according to its mayor, Sergei Sobyanin.
On the front, Ukrainian troops are struggling, suffering from their inferiority in weapons and personnel, and retreating in multiple sectors in eastern Ukraine, where Russian troops have been advancing for months. Furthermore, thousands of North Korean soldiers are, according to Kyiv and the West, deployed in the Russian region of Kursk, where the Ukrainian army has controlled a few hundred square kilometers since its surprise operation launched on August 6. Kyiv assures that they have already been engaged in combat.
“The West has a choice”
The West, however, refuses to allow Kyiv to strike deep into Russian territory with the weapons it supplies and to shoot down Russian missiles targeting Ukrainian cities, for fear that this could lead to an escalation. And with the victory in the American presidential election of Donald Trump, the question arises of the sustainability of American support, which has enabled Ukraine to resist Russian troops since February 2022. All the more so after the latest announcements from the Kremlin, which assured Sunday glimpse of “positive signals” in Trump’s attitude towards the conflict.
“The situation in the theater of hostilities is not in favor of the Kyiv regime, the West has a choice: continue its financing [de l’Ukraine] and the destruction of the Ukrainian population or admit the existing realities and start negotiating,” warned this week the head of the Russian Security Council and former Defense Minister, Sergei Shoigu.
