(Reuters) – Russian air defences destroyed or intercepted well over 100 Ukrainian drones over various Russian regions, including a swarm of drones heading for Moscow, officials said early on Wednesday.
The incidents were similar to waves of Ukrainian drone attacks targeting Moscow and other cities last week.
Russia in the past week also sent waves of drones to attack Ukrainian cities, including what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy described as the launch of more than 900 drones over a three-day period ending early on Monday morning.
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, writing in a series of posts on the Telegram messaging app, said Defence Ministry units had repelled 27 drones while they were travelling towards the Russian capital.
Sobyanin made no mention of casualties or damage, saying only that recovery teams were examining drone fragments at the sites where they hit the ground.
Russia’s Defence Ministry had earlier said its units had downed 112 drones between 9 p.m. and midnight Moscow time. Fifty-nine of those drones were intercepted over the Bryansk region on the Ukrainian border, with other incidents occurring in five different regions.
The governor of Bryansk region reported no casualties, but said a house and six cars had been damaged in the attack.
In Smolensk region, near the Polish border, the regional governor said 11 drones had been downed, with no casualties.
The three-night Russian drone barrage against Ukraine struck a series of cities and represented one of the biggest such assaults since Moscow launched the full-scale war in early 2022.
The strikes on Saturday night killed at least 12 people, Ukrainian officials said, including three children in the region of Zhytomyr, west of Kyiv. (This story has been corrected to make clear drones, not missiles, downed in the headline, and drones, not missiles, were fired, in paragraph 9)
(Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Bill Berkrot, Sandra Maler and Lincoln Feast.)
