Ukrainian drones hammered a refinery in Moscow on Thursday and disrupted local air traffic, in what appeared to be the largest such attack on the city since Russia invaded Ukraine over four years ago.
The aerial assault was the latest in a series of drone strikes that have demonstrated Ukraine’s growing ability to pierce Russia’s air defenses after years during which large Russian cities were mostly insulated from the fighting across the border.
Russian missile defenses shot down at least 194 drones that were flying toward Moscow in several waves on Thursday morning, Sergei S. Sobyanin, the city’s mayor, said in a statement. The assault on the capital was part of a broader drone attack across Russia on Thursday, with the Russian Defense Ministry saying that it had stopped over 550 drones overall.
The drone strikes injured at least 16 people in the Moscow region, according to Andrei Y. Vorobyev, the area’s governor. All of Moscow’s four airports shut down for most of the morning before gradually reopening early Thursday.
Mr. Sobyanin said that some of the Ukrainian drones had struck a sprawling oil refinery that towers over the city to the southeast and that had already been targeted in a smaller attack on Tuesday.
Videos from the scene circulating on social media showed open flames in several locations at the refinery and black plumes of smoke billowing over the area.
The attacks on the refinery are part of Ukraine’s monthslong campaign to target oil facilities that are crucial to Russia’s war effort. The refinery covers some 40 percent of Moscow’s needs for gasoline, and the strikes on Thursday were likely to further strain supplies across the country. Ukrainian attacks have also been causing shortages in Russian-occupied Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
Ukrainian drones also damaged Moscow’s largest open-air market on Thursday, according to Mr. Sobyanin, the mayor. One of the city’s largest shopping malls had to shut down after a drone attack, Mr. Vorobyev, the regional governor, said in a statement. Another drone rammed into a high-rise residential building in the suburb of Zhukovsky, according to the local mayor there.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said on social media on Thursday that the drone strikes were a “fully justified response to Russian attacks on our cities and communities.” Russia has pummeled Ukraine with ballistic missiles and drones in recent days, damaging, among other sites, a centuries-old cathedral and monastic site in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital. Russian ballistic missiles and drones also hit Kyiv overnight. No casualties were immediately reported.
Russian cities have in recent months become increasingly vulnerable to aerial attacks as Ukraine has ramped up drone production and started using large numbers of longer-range drones to strike hundreds of miles into Russian territory.
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