Ukraine has claimed responsibility for a drone strike that struck Moscow overnight, illustrating the vulnerability of the Russian capital, while other strikes have targeted Crimea and Ukraine’s Odessa region.
The attack on Moscow was “a special operation of the GUR,” the military intelligence service, a Ukrainian defense source, told AFP, asking not to be named.
This rare claim by Kiev, which it generally denies or does not comment on, comes after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky promised retaliatory measures following the Russian bombing of Odessa over the weekend that killed two people and devastated a cathedral.
Russia is now considering “severe retaliation” following the attacks on the Russian capital and Crimea, Russian diplomats said, accusing the West of being “behind kyiv’s brazen actions.”
The Moscow region has not been attacked by drones for almost three weeks. The Russian military, which denounced an “act of terrorism”, said two of the drones were neutralized and landed without causing any casualties.
One of the drones crashed on one of the main thoroughfares of the Russian capital, Komsomolsky Prospekt, near the Russian Defense Ministry. AFP journalists saw a building with a damaged roof, several police and fire vehicles, as well as an ambulance.
“It was 3:39 am. The house shook a lot,” Vladimir, 70, who lives in Moscow, told AFP. “It is outrageous that a Ukrainian drone almost crashed into the Defense Ministry,” he said.
Another drone hit the shopping center on Likhatcheva Street in southern Moscow, where an AFP photographer saw broken windows at the top of a building near a store owned by the French group Leroy Merlin.
The Russian capital and its surroundings, more than 500 kilometers from the border with Ukraine, have already been the target of drone strikes, including one that hit the Kremlin in May.
On July 4, five drones were shot down over this region, according to Russian authorities, an attack that disrupted the operation of Vnukovo, one of Moscow’s three international airports.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said today that “measures” were being taken to defend the capital and that “all drones” had been destroyed.
The attack echoes week-long attacks on annexed Crimea and southern Ukraine, where tensions rose further after Russia withdrew from a key deal to export Ukrainian grain across the Black Sea.
In Crimea, an ammunition depot was hit by a new attack by a Ukrainian drone in the Djankoi district, in the north of the annexed peninsula, Russian Governor Sergei Asksionov reported today.
According to the Russian army, 14 Ukrainian drones launched over Crimea were neutralized by interception systems and another three were shot down by anti-aircraft defense.
In Ukraine, a child was killed and six people injured in a Russian shelling in the east of the country that Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said hit a “local lake, where people rested” in Kostiantynivka.
AFP journalist Dylan Collins was injured in a drone strike while reporting on a Ukrainian artillery emplacement near Bakhmut, also in eastern Ukraine. According to the doctors, his life is not in danger.
A new attack by Russian drones, which lasted “almost four hours”, targeted a Ukrainian port facility on the Danube in the Odessa region, causing the destruction of a shed where grain was stored, the Ukrainian army reported today.
“I strongly condemn the recent Russian attacks on the Ukrainian civilian infrastructure on the Danube, very close to Romania,” Romanian President Klaus Iohannis reacted.
In a context of increasing Russian bombardments against agricultural facilities, Volodymyr Zelensky today considered “unacceptable” the possibility of extending the restrictions imposed by five EU countries on imports of Ukrainian cereals.
On Sunday, Zelensky vowed “retaliation” following Russian missile attacks on Odessa, whose historic center was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site earlier this year.
A regular target of Russian attacks, this port city suffered a new night attack on Saturday night, killing two people and wounding 22, including at least four children.
The Transfiguration Cathedral, founded more than 200 years ago, destroyed by the Soviets in 1936 and then rebuilt in the early 2000s, was badly damaged in the attacks.
The Kremlin today denied attacking this religious building, insisting it had been hit by Ukrainian “anti-missile” fire. French diplomats accused Moscow of “deliberately” attacking civilian infrastructure.
The Russian Deputy Prime Minister in charge of Defense, Denis Manturov, revealed that Russia is producing the same amount of ammunition per month that it would produce in the whole of 2022, having also increased the production of military weapons in the 17th month of its offensive in Ukraine.
Source: TSF
