Drones strike Moscow in fifth attack since May

For the fifth time in three months, Moscow has once again been targeted by drones. In what is fast becoming a regular occurrence, the Russian ministry of defence reported that two drones attacked the city in the early hours of this morning.

Despite the ministry’s claims to have intercepted and jammed the drones, they were still able to inflict damage on two buildings in the south west of the city. According to the government news agency TASS, one of the drones hit a non-residential building on Komsomolsky Prospekt, a mere two miles from the Kremlin and just over the river from Moscow’s famous Gorky Park.

The building damaged by the drone is also a stone’s throw from the main building of the ministry of defence and just over the road from the Alexander Nevsky military hospital. According to Bellingcat’s Christo Grozev, several other buildings belonging to Russia’s foreign intelligence agency, the GRU, are located in the area, including their cyber offence and illegals programme headquarters. That these buildings narrowly avoided being struck will undoubtably be unsettling for Russia’s military officials.

The second drone hit a business centre south of the Moscow river on Likhachev Avenue. The building was still under construction, with damage done to the 17th and 18th storeys. According to Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin, no one was injured or killed in the incident.

Footage circulating on social media claiming to show the immediate aftermath of the attack shows smoke rising up from a tall building whose upper windows have been blown out. More pictures show shattered glass littering the pavement on the ground below the alleged drone strike locations.

Once again, Russia has blamed the incident on Ukraine, calling it an attempted ‘terrorist attack’ by the ‘Kyiv regime’. Whoever is responsible for the drones, it is quickly becoming clear that Moscow’s reality as the new home front in Russia’s war in Ukraine is here to stay.

This is the fifth time the city has been targeted since the start of May. Despite Moscow’s showy air defences that were erected at the start of the year, these drones have been able to repeatedly fly into the heart of the city. This isn’t the largest drone attack Moscow has encountered since then, and it certainly won’t be the last.

The news comes as Russia continues to shell Odesa in south Ukraine following the collapse of the grain export deal last week, with the city sustaining heavy casualties and large levels of destruction. That once again damage has successfully been inflicted on Russia’s capital city will no doubt provide a small morale booster to Ukrainians waking up this morning.