At least four people have been killed in a large-scale retaliatory strike by Ukraine on Russia’s regions, including Moscow, Russian authorities have said.
The wave of almost 600 Ukrainian drones struck overnight across 14 Russian regions, as well as the Crimean peninsula and the Black and Azov seas, the Russian defence ministry said on Sunday, with the region around the capital among the worst-hit.
Three people were killed in the Moscow region and one in the Belgorod region, authorities said, as Russian air defences shot down 556 drones overnight and neutralised another 30 after dawn.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said last week that more drone strikes would be launched in retaliation for a deadly three-day Russian attack across Ukraine that killed more than 20 people and injured about 50 others.
Moscow’s regional governor, Andrei Vorobyov, said a woman had been killed when a home was hit in Khimki, north of the capital, in what he described as a “massive” strike on the region, which surrounds but does not include the capital.
Vorobyov said rescuers were still searching the debris for another person. Two men had also been killed in the village of Pogorelki, 10km (6 miles) north of Moscow, after drone debris fell on a construction site, he added, and several residential high-rises and “infrastructure facilities” were damaged.