Multiple apartment buildings hit, injuries reported What we know about the drone attack on Moscow

Multiple residential buildings in Moscow were hit by drones on Tuesday morning. One drone hit a building on the city’s Profsoyuznaya Street and another hit one on Atlasov Street in New Moscow, part of the Moscow metropolitan area. At 98 Profsoyuznaya Street, a drone hit an apartment building’s upper floors, damaging the facade and windows and causing residents of three stories to evacuate. The Russian state news agency RIA Novosti reported that a building on Atlasov Street also had its facade and windows damaged by a drone.

Emergency service workers also went to a building on the city’s Leninsky Avenue, presumably in response to a drone crash there. The Telegram channel 112 reported that people were injured at the scene but did not say how many. The section of Udaltsov Street from Leninsky Avenue to Mikhail Pevtsov Street has been closed to traffic, according to the Moscow Transport Department.

Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin said that several buildings in the city sustained “minor damage” as the result of the drone attack but that “nobody was seriously injured.” “All emergency services are at the affected sites. They’re investigating the circumstances of the incident,” he wrote on Telegram. He later added that two people sought medical care but that nobody required hospitalization.

Other drones were shot down in the wider Moscow region. TV Rain reported that explosions were heard in the satellite cities of Odintsovo and Krasnogorsk as well as around the Novorizhskoe and Rublyovskoe highways. Andrey Vorobyov, the governor of the Moscow region, reported that multiple drones were shot down while approaching the capital. He asked residents to remain calm.

The Telegram channel Baza reported that 25 drones were involved in the attack. Most of them, the channel said, were downed by air defenses in the Moscow suburbs, while some got stuck in trees and utility lines. Three drones reportedly hit residential buildings, and the explosive device on one of them failed to detonate. The outlet RBC reported that 10 drones were shot down, citing its own sources. According to one of the sources, drones were shot down in the Istrinsky, Krasnogorsk, and Odintsovsky districts, while a second source said that two more drones were downed in New Moscow.

The Russian Defense Ministry reported that Russian air defense forces downed eight drones. “Three of them were put down by electronic warfare means, which caused them to lose control and deviate from their intended targets. Another five drones were downed by Pantsir-S anti-aircraft missile-gun systems in the Moscow suburbs,” the agency said in a statement published by the state-run news agency RIA Novosti. The ministry didn’t report the total number of drones involved in the attack.

After the drone attack, the Russian authorities began jamming satellite navigation signals in the city. According to the Telegram channel Mash, drivers have started reporting GPS malfunctions.

The Russian authorities have accused Ukraine of carrying out the attack. “This morning, a terrorist attack was carried out by the Kyiv regime using drones against targets in Moscow,” read the Defense Ministry’s statement.

Ukraine has denied responsibility for the attack. “We’re watching with pleasure and predicting an increase in the number of attacks, but we have no direct involvement, of course,” said Zelensky advisor Mykhailo Podolyak. He added that the Ukrainian authorities are more concerned with the increasingly frequent shelling attacks on Kyiv than with drones in Moscow: “This is of little interest to us.”

Andrey Kartapolov, the chair of the Russian State Duma’s Defense Committee, called the attack on Moscow an “information campaign” and an “act of terror against the civilian population,” adding that the most important task right now is to prevent panic among civilians and to assess what happened. He also said the attack was possible because Russia is a large country: “It will always be possible to find a gap where a drone can fly through and bypass air defense systems.”

This is a developing story.