Black smoke from a burning oil refinery filled the Moscow sky. The city’s four airports were urgently closed. And part of the busy highway that rings the Russian capital, a metropolis of 13 million people, was shut down.
As Ukraine escalated its effort to bring the war home for Russians, the strikes on Thursday appeared to be the largest drone attack on the Russian capital since President Vladimir V. Putin launched the war more than four years ago.
No deaths were immediately reported. But the large-scale assault seemed likely to feed fears among Russians that the Kremlin’s ability to isolate society from the impacts of the war was sharply eroding. That would usher in a new stage for a conflict that has now run longer than World War I.
For days, lines have formed and rationing has been implemented at gas stations in dozens of Russian regions, as persistent Ukrainian drone attacks on oil refineries and processing facilities have threatened a fuel shortage.
Ukraine has taken particular aim at Crimea, the peninsula that Russia illegally annexed in 2014, with a range of strikes aimed at cutting off the region’s supply lines. The Russian economy has also begun suffering from the costs of the war in a way that the Kremlin had managed to avoid for years.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, in a voice memo shared with journalists on Thursday, warned, “If Ukraine burns, then your Moscow will burn as well.”
Mr. Zelensky cast the drone onslaught as a response to an attack this week on the Pechersk Lavra monastery complex in Kyiv, one of the holiest sites in Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Russia claimed that the complex had been hit by an errant Ukrainian interceptor missile.
Mr. Zelensky has been emboldened by technological and production advances in Ukrainian drone warfare that have enabled his government to send larger swarms of drones into Russian airspace and overwhelm defenses. The Russian Defense Ministry said that during the attack on Thursday, it downed 992 drones countrywide, the largest number in a single attack in the war and a significant increase in scale from prior Ukrainian onslaughts.
Hard-liners in Russia responded to the assault by urging the Kremlin to unleash the country’s full military capabilities to prevent Ukraine from escalating attacks within Russia’s borders.
How much further the Russian military can go without turning to nuclear weapons is unclear. But the calls from the hard-liners raised the prospect of a new cycle of escalation, with the virtual stalemate along the front line giving way to competing airborne bombardments far from the battlefield.
“We must strike the enemy mercilessly, without hesitation,” Andrei Gurulyov, a former general and a lawmaker in Russia’s governing party, told the Russian news outlet RTVI. He called on Moscow to “eliminate the entire leadership, destroy all command centers, bring the entire industrial sector to its knees” and “achieve success at the front.”
It is far from clear whether the increased pressure at home will push Mr. Putin to end the war. Moscow has stated that it will not stop fighting until its forces take the rest of the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine or the land is handed over in a peace deal, as Washington proposed last year. Kyiv still holds a swath of territory about twice the size of Rhode Island in the region, which includes cities that have been heavily fortified since 2014.
Mr. Putin did not address the Ukrainian attack during comments on Thursday afternoon at a summit of Southeast Asian leaders in the Russian city of Kazan.
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 drone strikes injured at least 17 people in the Moscow region, according to Andrei Y. Vorobyev, the area’s governor. All of Moscow’s 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 been targeted in a smaller attack on Tuesday.
Ukraine’s Defense Ministry published dramatic footage of a roof at the fuel facility flying into the air as the installation was engulfed in flames.
Residents of Moscow’s southeastern areas woke up on Thursday to the thuds of Ukrainian drones crashing into the refinery. Soon, plumes of toxic smoke hung over several neighborhoods, with images online showing the aftermath of rain slicked with oil falling from the sky.
There were no sirens or notifications from the emergency services, Nikolai, 44, who lives in a neighborhood northeast of the refinery, said by phone from Moscow. Photographs taken from his house showed billowing smoke, although the refinery is four miles away.
“It was clear from the start that this one was way more serious. Since early morning, we’ve been able to see at least two sources of fire there,” he said, comparing Thursday’s attack to the strike on the refinery on Tuesday. He asked that his last name be withheld because of possible repercussions from the authorities for discussing the strikes.
Nikolai, who called himself a staunch opponent of Mr. Putin and the war, said he had always thought that Russia’s aggression against Ukraine would eventually come back to haunt the country.
He said that neighbors in his mostly working-class area appeared to be spooked. But many are still unable to make a mental link between Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the attacks at home, he said.
“People in the yard outside this morning go around asking something like, ‘How is that possible?’” he said. “I see anger and confusion, but I don’t think people can still put two and two together.”
“It’s like they were told for a long time not to look up,” he added, “and now it’s as if they have lifted their heads for the first time, and it’s impossible not to look up.”
The refinery that was attacked on Thursday covers some 40 percent of Moscow’s needs for gasoline, and the strikes were likely to further strain supplies across the country. The Moscow authorities said that gas stations across the city were working as usual.
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.
Russia has pummeled Ukraine with ballistic missiles and drones in recent days, damaging the monastery complex and other sites. No casualties were immediately reported in strikes against Kyiv early Thursday.
Many Russians have become nervous about sharing imagery and video online of the increasing Ukrainian attacks. The Moscow antiterrorism task force last month issued an order restricting the publication of photos and videos showing the aftermath of Ukrainian attacks.
A pro-war Russian blogger told the online outlet SOTA that he had been summoned by the police after sharing a video of the attack on the oil refinery earlier this week.
Vladimir Solovyov, a hard-line state news commentator, said, “Everyone who sends such material needs to be jailed, and publicly at that.”
He urged Russians not to panic and to draw strength from family stories, a reference to previous times in Russian history that were worse.
“If you feel you can’t go on, if you’re wringing your hands in despair, well, just make up your mind. Leave. If you are weak. If there is nothing Russian in you. Follow the path of traitors,” Mr. Solovyov said in a clip that circulated widely online.
Valerie Hopkins, Alina Lobzina, Oleg Matsnev and Siobhán O’Grady contributed reporting.
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