According to Moscow Mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, Russian air defences have shot down “several” drones targeting the Moscow region.
It comes after Russian ballistic missiles hit an apartment complex and a university building in the central Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih on Monday, July 31, 2023, killing five people and leaving 64 with injuries.
The Russian defence ministry disclosed that two drones were destroyed by air defence systems in the Odintsovo and Narofominsk districts near Moscow, while a third was jammed and crashed in the capital, a Russian state news agency reported early on Tuesday, August 1, 2023.
The ministry accused Ukraine of launching the attacks.
Sobyanin noted in a Telegram post that no injuries had been reported. “The facade of the 21st floor was damaged. The glazing of 150 square metres was broken,” he said.
He added that the building hit on Tuesday was the same one struck in a drone attack on Sunday, July 30, 2023.
On Sunday, July 30, 2023, The Russian defence ministry stated that it had intercepted three Ukrainian drones over the capital in an attack that damaged two buildings and briefly suspended operations at the Vnukovo International Airport.
The Kremlin said that assault was “an act of desperation” by Kyiv due to setbacks on the battlefield in Ukraine.
The attacks on Tuesday marked at least the fifth time that unmanned aerial vehicles have reached the Russian capital since May when two drones came down over the Kremlin.
Moscow and its surrounding area are more than 500km from the Ukrainian border and the ongoing conflict there.
Also on Tuesday, Russia announced that it has repelled an overnight Ukrainian drone attack targeting its patrol boats in the Black Sea.
In a statement, Russia’s Defence ministry noted, “During the night, Ukrainian armed forces tried without success to attack with three drones the ‘Sergei Kotov’ and ‘Vasily Bykov,’ patrol boats of the Russian fleet in the Black Sea.”
“The three naval enemy drones were destroyed”, the ministry disclosed, adding that the boats were attacked 340 kilometres (210 miles) southwest of Sevastopol, the base of Russia’s Black Sea fleet on the annexed Crimea peninsula.
Naval drones are remote-controlled boats that operate on the surface of the water. Moscow regularly accuses the Ukrainian army of using them to attack targets in the Black Sea.
Drones Hit Kharkiv
In other developments, officials in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, disclosed on Tuesday that drones hit populated areas of the city and one drone destroyed two floors of a college dormitory.
Volodymyr Tymoshko, the chief of police in the Kharkiv region, said that there were two night-time strikes; one on the college and one on the city centre. One person was injured in the city centre, he told reporters.
The college building was empty at the time of the strike.
Kharkiv Mayor, Ihor Terekhov, on the other hand, spoke of three strikes. “One of the drones destroyed two floors of a dormitory,” Terekhov wrote on the Telegram messaging app.
“A fire broke out and emergency services are attending,” he added.
A video posted on social media showed the top of a building ablaze and smoke billowing upwards. It was reported that half of the college building was destroyed.
