Ukraine launches 1,000 drones at Russia in biggest ever strike on Moscow

Ukraine launched more than 1,000 drones at Russia overnight, including hundreds aimed at Moscow, officials said on Sunday, as the Kremlin was wrapping up the third and final day of its parliamentary elections. The attack was described by Moscow's mayor as the largest drone strike yet on the Russian capital.

Officials said the strikes damaged the Moscow Oil Refinery, one of several sites supplying the capital, and a residential building. Across the wider Moscow region, two people were killed and 20 were injured, according to regional governor Andrei Vorobyov.

Vorobyov said those killed were a 74-year-old man and a 44-year-old woman. Russia's Ministry of Defence said its forces shot down 1,110 Ukrainian drones across Russia, as well as over the annexed Crimean peninsula and the waters of the Black Sea. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said 450 drones had been destroyed while heading towards the capital. He said the 'unprecedented attack' was an attempt to disrupt the elections and added, 'The enemy failed in this regard.'

On social media, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Kyiv had used a range of missiles and drones in the attack, including the domestically made Flamingo and Pelican missiles, to strike oil and logistics facilities. 'These are billions of dollars that sustain the war machine,' Zelenskyy said, referring to the financial pressure Kyiv hopes to put on Russia's economy.

Zelenskyy also said Ukraine was continuing to repel Russian attacks. He said a Russian drone strike hit a monastery in Ukraine's Kherson region on Saturday, killing a member of the clergy and injuring four people. In another attack on the Ukrainian capital on Saturday evening, a mother and her two children were killed, according to Tymur Tkachenko, head of the Kyiv regional state administration. He later said another child injured in the same strike died in hospital on Sunday.

The attack came on the final day of Russia's first wartime parliamentary election, a vote that has been virtually devoid of opposition to President Vladimir Putin's policies and is widely expected to reinforce the Kremlin's dominance. Russia was also holding voting in the four Ukrainian regions it claims to have annexed after the war began, though it does not fully control them, and in Crimea, which it annexed in 2014. Kyiv has called the move illegal.

In a Russian-occupied part of Ukraine's Kherson region, a Ukrainian attack killed a member of the local electoral committee, Russia's Central Election Commission said. Since Russia's invasion more than four years ago, Ukraine has emerged as a major force in military drone technology, using domestically produced long-range drones along with missiles to strike deep inside Russia. Moscow and Kyiv have meanwhile become locked in a growing exchange of long-range aerial attacks, even as fighting along the roughly 1,250-kilometre front line in eastern and southern Ukraine has slowed under the threat posed by large numbers of drones and ground robots.

Overall, the overnight strikes marked a major escalation in Ukraine's long-range attacks on Russia, hitting Moscow and other areas as Russia concluded its wartime parliamentary vote, while both sides reported fresh deaths and damage in the continuing conflict.