Kyiv: Russian air defences intercepted nearly 900 Ukrainian drones overnight over multiple regions of the country, as well as the occupied Crimean Peninsula and the Sea of Azov, the Defence Ministry in Moscow said Tuesday.
Unconfirmed media reports said a major fuel depot in the Moscow region was on fire after the attack that killed two people.
Ukraine’s domestically developed long-range drones and, increasingly, missiles have allowed Kyiv to hit Russian soil during the more than 4.5 years since Moscow’s forces launched a full-scale invasion.
The bigger Russian military’s air superiority during the war has made aerial attacks on civilian areas of Ukraine routine.
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said 650 drones flew toward the Moscow region between Monday evening and Tuesday morning. Most were destroyed far away, and 105 were downed as they approached the city, he said.
Sobyanin later reported 68 more drones targeting Moscow were downed during daylight Tuesday morning.
Ukraine has regularly targeted Russian oil refineries and storage depots, claiming last weekend that it had disabled 51 per cent of Russia’s oil refining capacity. The claim could not be independently verified. Russian President Vladimir Putin said last week that the attacks had cost Russia roughly 1 per cent of its gross domestic product.
Russia has traditionally been the world’s third-largest producer of refined fuel products from crude, after the US and China. The Kremlin has banned diesel exports due to the Ukrainian strikes, pushing global prices higher. That prompted US President Donald Trump last month to urge Ukraine to stop hitting Russia’s refineries.
After several days of targeting bridges in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, as part of a campaign to make civilian life difficult, Russia attacked one of the bridges over the Dnipro River in the southern city of Zaporizhzhia, according to Mykhailo Semikin, the regional military administration chief.
Traffic across the bridge was temporarily suspended as a result of the attack, he said.
A nighttime Russian attack on a Zaporizhzhia residential building wounded five people and a daylight strike on a warehouse in the city caused a large fire, regional head Mikhail Semikin said.
Russian forces are also trying to choke shipping in Ukrainian ports in the Black Sea, denying Kyiv vital grain export revenue.
The Russian Defence Ministry said its forces overnight struck targets in Ukraine’s southern Odesa region on the Black Sea coast with drones. An ammunition depot was hit, as were a bulk carrier in the Chornomorsk port carrying dual-use goods and port infrastructure in Izmail, the ministry said.
