Largest attack on Moscow sees Ukraine fire hundreds of drones, mayor says

Ukraine has fired its largest drone attack on the Moscow region, the mayor has said, hitting the city’s main oil refinery and a residential building.

Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said 450 drones heading for the capital had been shot down in what he called “the most massive” attack. The region’s governor said at least two people were killed and 20 injured.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed Kyiv had hit a “key” Russian oil facility and a logistics site in the region with drones and missiles, representing “billions of dollars that sustain the war machine”.

Ukrainian officials meanwhile said nine people, including three children, had been killed in Russian attacks in the Kyiv and Sumy regions on Saturday.

Russia and Ukraine have recently intensified their strikes, targeting energy-generating and transport facilities, as well as major logistics hubs.

A 44-year-old woman was killed in Sofyino on Sunday after a drone hit a three-storey residential building, regional head Andrei Vorobyev said. Another five people – including two children – were injured.

An elderly man died after a private house was hit in the Orekhovo-Zuevo district, Governor Andrei Vorobyev added.

Videos verified by the BBC on social media show explosions in the night skies above Moscow, and a burning warehouse.

Mayor Sobyanin said a drone had struck a building near one of the capital’s boulevards and the oil refinery – where Ukrainian military officials said three key units had been damaged.

The site supplies more than a third of the Moscow region’s fuel, according to the defence ministry in Kyiv, and some of its petrol, diesel and aviation fuel go to Russia’s military.

Ukraine’s defence minister said attacking such facilities “directly undermines the enemy’s ability to continue its war of aggression and supply its military formations”.

Sobyanin said the major attack was “an attempt to disrupt” Russia’s parliamentary election, which was in its third day on Sunday. The vote is tightly controlled by the Kremlin and has been dismissed by critics as neither free, fair nor transparent.

Russian state media reported that an election official was one of two people killed by a drone attack on a bus in a Moscow-controlled part of Kherson in Ukraine on Sunday, citing the head of Russia’s election commission.