Ukraine has claimed responsibility for a drone strike that hit Moscow overnight, illustrating the vulnerability of the Russian capital, while further attacks targeted Ukraine’s Crimea and Odessa region.
The attack on Moscow was “a GUR special operation,” the military intelligence agency, a Ukrainian defense source, who declined to be named, told AFP.
This rare statement from Kiev, which he usually denies or does not comment on, comes after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky promised retaliation following the weekend’s Russian bombing of Odessa that killed two people and destroyed a cathedral.
Russia is now considering “serious reprisals” after attacks on the Russian capital and Crimea, Russian diplomats said, accusing the West of being “behind Kiev’s brutal actions”.
The Moscow region has not been targeted by drones for nearly three weeks.
The Russian military, denouncing an “act of terrorism”, said two of the drones were neutralized and landed without casualties.
One of the drones crashed on one of the main streets 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 and an ambulance.
“It was 3:39 am. The house was shaking a lot,” 70-year-old Vladimir, who lives in Moscow, told AFP. “It is outrageous that a Ukrainian drone almost flew into the Defense Ministry,” he said.
Another drone hit the shopping center on Likhatcheva Street in southern Moscow, where an AFP photographer spotted broken windows atop a building near a store owned by 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 on Monday that “measures” were being taken to defend the capital and that “all drones” had been destroyed.
The strike echoes attacks that have been targeting annexed Crimea and southern Ukraine for a week, where tensions have risen further after Russia pulled out of a major deal to export Ukrainian grain across the Black Sea.
In Crimea, an ammunition depot has been 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 military, 14 Ukrainian drones launched over Crimea were neutralized by intercept systems and three others were shot down by anti-aircraft fire.
In Ukraine, a child died and six people were injured in a Russian bombing in the east of the country that hit a “local lake, where people were resting” in Kostiantynivka, Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said.
AFP journalist Dylan Collins was injured in a drone strike while covering a Ukrainian artillery emplacement near Bakhmut, also in eastern Ukraine. According to the doctors, his life is not in danger.
A new Russian drone strike, which lasted “nearly four hours”, targeted a Ukrainian port facility on the Danube in the Odessa region and caused the destruction of a barn storing grain, the Ukrainian army reported.
“I strongly condemn the recent Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure on the Danube, very close to Romania,” said Romanian President Klaus Iohannis.
In a context of increased Russian bombing of agricultural installations, Volodymyr Zelensky today deemed the possibility of extending restrictions imposed by five EU countries on the import of Ukrainian grains “unacceptable”.
On Sunday, Zelensky vowed “retaliation” after Russian missile attacks on Odessa, whose historic center was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site earlier this year.
Regularly targeted by Russian attacks, this port city suffered another overnight attack on Saturday night, which killed two people and injured 22, including at least four children.
Founded more than 200 years ago, the Transfiguration Cathedral, destroyed by the Soviets in 1936 and then rebuilt in the early 2000s, was heavily damaged in the attacks.
The Kremlin on Monday denied targeting this religious building, insisting it had been hit by Ukrainian “anti-missile fire”. French diplomats accused Moscow of “deliberately” attacking civilian infrastructure.
Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister in charge of Defense Denis Manturov revealed that Russia is producing the same amount of munitions each month as in the entire year 2022, after also increasing military weapons production in the 17th month of its offensive in Ukraine.
Source: DN
