New Delhi: Moscow came under the largest Ukrainian drone attack reported so far on Sunday, with several drones reaching the Moscow Oil Refinery and another striking a residential building. The overnight attack killed two people in the Moscow region and triggered the evacuation of hundreds of residents, marking a major escalation in Ukraine’s long-range strikes against targets deep inside Russia.
The Moscow region governor, Andrey Vorobyov, said air-defence and electronic-warfare systems had intercepted or suppressed 249 drones across 17 districts between 3am and 5am, while the attack was still continuing. He said the most serious damage was reported in the Ramenskoye district, where a drone crash caused a fire on the roof of a 21-storey apartment building, forcing the evacuation of 400 people, including 70 children.
Vorobyov later said 20 people, including three children, required medical attention following the attack, with 15 of them hospitalized. He confirmed that two people were killed, a 44-year-old woman in Sofyino and a 74-year-old man in the Orekhovo-Zuyevsky district.
The attack also caused damage and fires in several other parts of the Moscow region. Vorobyov said a warehouse complex caught fire in Sofyino, while a drone strike caused a fire at an apartment building in Kotelniki. Private homes were damaged in Ramenskoye, Kolomna and Yegoryevsk, while residential and business buildings were damaged in Istra. Fires were also reported in apartment buildings in Leninskoye, Lyubertsy and Lytkarino.
The Moscow refinery was among the key facilities hit during the assault.
The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said the strikes had hit a key enterprise in Russia’s oil industry as well as a logistics facility in the Moscow region. In a post on Telegram, Zelenskyy said Ukraine used a range of long-range weapons in the operation and credited the country’s security and intelligence agencies with carrying out the strikes.
Zelenskyy said the strikes had a significant impact on infrastructure supporting Russia’s war effort and claimed that the targeted facilities represented billions of dollars linked to the Russian war machine. He also said sanctions had been imposed on an enterprise in Russia’s Voronezh region.
The foreign minister of Ukraine, Andrii Sybiha, also commented on the attack on X, said his morning began with messages from foreign colleagues about what he called “Moscow Burning Day”. He said the situation was not an outcome the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, expected when he began the war and argued that Russians should hold Putin responsible for the conflict. Sybiha urged Putin to look at the flames over Moscow and end the war.
The attack comes as Moscow and Kyiv continue to target each other’s energy and industrial infrastructure despite recent US efforts to secure an understanding on stopping attacks against energy facilities. Ukraine has increasingly used long-range drones to strike Russian oil refineries, fuel infrastructure and other facilities that it says contribute to Russia’s military operations, while Russia has continued missile and drone attacks against Ukrainian cities and critical infrastructure.
The latest strikes are part of a wider shift in the Russia-Ukraine war towards attacks on strategic infrastructure far from the battlefield. Ukraine has sought to put pressure on Russia’s oil sector, which supplies fuel and revenue supporting the war, while Moscow has repeatedly targeted Ukraine’s energy network and other critical infrastructure.
The Moscow refinery is one of Russia’s major fuel-processing facilities. It processed around 11.6 million tonnes of crude oil in 2024 and produced about 2.9 million tonnes of gasoline and 3.2 million tonnes of diesel, according to the media reports.