Russia came under the largest attack from Ukrainian drones in two years with an oil refinery in the Moscow struck for the second time this week. File photo courtesy EMERCOM of Russia Press Service/EPA-EFE
June 18 (UPI) — Russia came under the largest attack from Ukrainian drones in two years early Thursday with an oil refinery in the southeast of the capital struck for the second time this week and damage to a shopping center and an apartment building. One person was slightly injured.
The state-run TASS news agency said hundreds of drones targeted multiple Russian regions, 555 of which were downed or intercepted. The attack came a month after a May 17 raid when 556 Ukrainian drones were shot down.
Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin said Thursday that air defenses had downed more than 190 drones over the city but that several managed to get through to the Moscow Oil Refinery in Kapotnya, where measures were being taken to “address the aftermath.”
Footage circulating online of Moscow shows black smoke billowing from raging fires, blackened skies over a significant area and at least one fireball from a large explosion that in some of the videos appears to show the lid of a fuel storage tank being blasted hundreds of feet skyward.
Moscow Region Gov. Andrey Vorobyov said a shopping mall in Lyubertsy in the southeast of the city was set on fire by falling drone debris and a fitness center building and a facility in an industrial zone were damaged, as well as a residential block further out in Zhukovsky, forcing the evacuation of residents.
Vorobyov said emergency services were on the scene in Stepanovo village near Elektrostal, 35 miles west of Moscow, after drone debris damaged the roof of a private house, injuring a woman.
The Russian Transport Ministry said the city’s four airports — Sheremetyevo, Vnukovo, Domodedovo, and Zhukovsky — were “temporarily not accepting or dispatching flights” for flight safety reasons.
Passengers at Sheremetyevo Airport, including those on board aircraft, were evacuated to shelters.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, calling what he termed “Ukraine’s long-range sanctions” totally justified, said targets in Russia’s Rostov region, directly east of Ukraine, and “temporarily occupied territories” of Ukraine were also hit.
“A completely fair response to Russian strikes on our cities and communities and another important result of the work of our soldiers on the facilities that provide support for the Russian military machine,” Zelensky wrote in an online post from Brussels, where he is attending a meeting of NATO’s Ukraine Defense Contact Group.
“These days, all our partners have noted the accuracy and effectiveness of our middle strikes and long-range sanctions. It is time to end this war, and Russia must take the necessary steps in diplomacy,” he added, thanking the Ukraine military, security service, military intelligence, special forces and missile brigades for their work.
The strikes came after Ukrainian drones struck oil plants in Moscow and Russia’s southern Krasnodar Krai region early Tuesday, with at least one hitting the Gazprom-owned Moscow Oil Refinery, which supplies more than a third of the capital’s fuel needs, as well as jet fuel and other refined products.
The attack in Krasnodar Krai set an oil depot ablaze near Poltavskaya village, 50 miles northwest of Krasnodar city. No deaths or injuries were reported in either incident.
Zelensky said the strikes were in retaliation for recent deadly Russian airborne assaults against Ukraine, including large-scale missile and drone strikes across central and eastern regions of the country early Monday that killed 11 people and damaged a UNESCO Heritage Site in Kyiv.
