(Reuters) – Ukraine targeted the Russian capital early on Wednesday in what seemed to be the biggest drone attack so far, forcing the closure of two of the airports serving the city, sparking fires and damaging houses, officials and media said.
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said that at least 60 drones were destroyed on approach towards the city.
“At the moment, the roof of a building in Moscow has been slightly damaged by falling debris from a downed UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle),” Sobyanin said in a post on the Telegram messaging app.
In an earlier post, he said there were no injuries, according to preliminary reports.
Moscow and its surrounding region, with a population of at least 21 million, is one of the biggest metropolitan areas in Europe, alongside Istanbul.
Baza, a news Telegram channel that is close to Russia’s security services, and other Russian news telegram channels posted videos of several residential fires around Moscow that they said were sparked by the attacks.
In one video Baza showed what it said was an apartment ablaze in a multi-storey residential building in the Ramenskoye district of the Moscow region, some 50 km (31 miles) southeast of the Kremlin.
Reuters could not independently verify the reports of the fires.
The strikes came as the United States is pushing for an end to the three-year war that Russia started with its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. On Tuesday, U.S. and Ukrainian teams are scheduled to meet for peace talks in Saudi Arabia.
Russia’s aviation watchdog said that flights were suspended at the Zhukovo and Domodedovo airports to ensure air safety following the reports of the attacks. Two other airports, in the Yaroslavl and Nizhny Novgorod regions, both east of Moscow, were also closed.
The governor of the Ryazan region, just southeast of the Moscow region, said that air defences repelled a drone attack on the region, with no injuries or damage reported.
A November drone attack on Moscow, the largest then in the war where at least 34 drones were destroyed, killed at least one civilian and wrecked dozens of homes around the capital.
Kyiv has often said that its strikes inside Russia are aimed at destroying infrastructure key to Moscow’s overall war efforts and are in response to Russia’s continued bombing of Ukraine.
Both sides deny targeting civilians in the attacks, but thousands of them have died in the conflict so far, the vast majority of them Ukrainian.
(Reporting by Lidia Kelly in Melbourne; Editing by Christopher Cushing and Michael Perry)
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