Crimea and Moscow hit by drone attacks after Russia launches missiles on Odesa

Two drones crashed into buildings in Moscow while more than a dozen targeted Crimea, with one hitting a weapons cache on the annexed peninsula, Russian officials said on Monday.

The attacks, which authorities said were conducted by Ukraine early on Monday, come a day after Russia launched a barrage of missiles on the southern Ukrainian port city of Odesa, killing one person and severely damaging the city’s historic cathedral.

They also mark at least the fourth time that drones have reached Moscow since early May when two drones were shot down late at night over the Kremlin. Others have hit buildings in suburban areas.

Ukraine does not usually claim responsibility for strikes in Russian territory and Crimea, but a senior official strongly suggested Kyiv had carried out the attacks as part of increased use of its “army of drones”.

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On Monday, Russia’s defence ministry claimed it successfully took down both drones over Moscow using “electromagnetic warfare”, where specialists disrupt the signals that guide drones to their targets.

One crashed into the top floors of a glass office building on Likhacheva Avenue, videos showed, causing substantial damage to the structure, which appears to have been under construction and not in use. State media reported that another hit a low-rise building on Komsomolsky Avenue, a main thoroughfare through Moscow, causing minor damage to the roof.

Both sites are located relatively close to the defence ministry’s main headquarters. A man was detained early on Monday filming the building, according to the Baza telegram channel, which is close to Russian police forces.

“Drone strikes on two non-residential buildings were recorded at around four o’clock this morning. No serious damage or casualties,” Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin wrote on his official social media channel on Monday.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “All the drones were neutralised.”

A resident of an apartment block near the Komsomolsky Avenue drone crash site recorded a video from inside his apartment, showing that the explosion shattered the glass in his windows. Both roads were closed after the attacks.

Russia’s defence minister said 17 drones were launched at Crimea, which was occupied and illegally annexed by Moscow in 2014. The peninsula’s governor said one drone hit a weapons store in Dzhankoi in the north, and road and rail travel in the area was suspended. Settlements in a 5km radius around the site were evacuated.

All the drones targeting Crimes were either shot down or suppressed using electromagnetic defences, the ministry said. Eleven crashed in the Black Sea and three landed on the peninsula, while no casualties were reported, it added.

Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, said in a Telegram post: “Electronic warfare and air defence are less and less able to protect the skies of the occupiers. Whatever happened there, there will be more of it.”

Fedorov’s comments highlight Ukraine’s strategy of neutralising Russia’s military threat from Crimea. Moscow has heavily militarised the Black Sea peninsula since 2014 and used it as a staging area to support its full-scale invasion launched 18 months ago.

Reducing the threat from the south is vital to helping Kyiv more efficiently conduct its counteroffensive along a more than 1,000km-long frontline in its southern and eastern regions, where Russia occupies about 18 per cent of Ukrainian territory.

Addressing the Aspen Security Forum at the weekend, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy suggested that further strikes could be conducted on the Crimean Bridge, which was last week damaged for a second time since Russia’s invasion by what Kremlin officials claimed was a Ukrainian sea drone strike.

“This is the road that is used to feed the war with ammunition. And it militarises the Crimean peninsula,” Mr Zelenskiy told the conference in Colorado, US. “This is an enemy facility built outside international law, so understandably, it is an objective.”

Ukrainian officials said Russia conducted an overnight drone strike against the port of Reni on the Danube river, which marks the country’s border with Romania, a member of the Nato military alliance.

Silos were set ablaze by the latest air strike in a Russian campaign that has targeted ports near Odesa after Moscow pulled out of the UN-brokered deal to export Ukrainian grain via the Black Sea.

Klaus Iohannis, Romania’s president, said he “strongly condemns the recent Russian attacks against Ukrainian civilian infrastructure on the Danube”.

“This is a provocation against Ukraine and Nato given that the strike was conducted de facto at the border with a Nato country,” said a senior Ukrainian military official on condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the matter. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2023