Three people have been reported dead as Russia’s Moscow region faced the largest Ukrainian assault in over a year on May 17. Another person reportedly died in the Belgorod region bordering Ukraine, with the Russian Defense Ministry reporting 556 drones had been downed over the country overnight and this morning in at least a dozen regions.
Moscow regional Governor Andrei Vorobyov confirmed the casualties and added that rescue teams still were searching for at least one person in the debris as several residential high-rises and infrastructure facilities were damaged in the attacks.
Russian air defenses destroyed 81 drones headed for Moscow since midnight, TASS reported, citing city Mayor Sergei Sobyanin. Sobyanin added that 12 people were injured, mostly near the entrance to one of Moscow’s oil refineries, although he claimed that none of the refinery’s technology had been damaged.
The country’s largest airport, Moscow’s Sheremetyevo, also reported that drone debris had fallen on the ground of the airfield though no damage was caused.
Ukrainian drones were also downed in the Kaluga, Bryansk, Smolensk and Pskov regions as well as Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula that Russia illegally annexed in 2014.
The attack comes only two days after a Russian missile hit an apartment bloc in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and killed 24 people, including three children, during one of the Kremlin’s heaviest barrages on the city this year.
Visiting the site of the Russian missile attack on May 15, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that “Ukraine will not allow any of the aggressor’s strikes that take the lives of our people to go unpunished,” adding he had discussed retaliatory strikes on Russia with his top military and intelligence officials.
The recent exchanges of barrages come shortly after the expiration of an uneasy three-day truce that coincided with Russia’s Victory Day parade on May 9 with Zelenskyy claiming that Moscow didn’t live up to at the front lines in eastern Ukraine.
