A woman in her eighties was also killed by Ukrainian shelling in Russian-held Donetsk. Moscow’s Vnukovo airport, located 15km southwest of the Russian capital, briefly suspended flights on Sunday morning after a drone was shot down in the airspace around the city.
The drone was destroyed by air defence systems in the Podolsk region of the Moscow suburbs, the Russian defence ministry said.
Authorities in Ukraine, which generally avoids commenting on attacks on Russian soil, didn’t say whether it launched the raid.
Flights were last halted at the airport on July 30, when two drones crashed into the Moscow City business district after being jammed by Russian air defences.
The attack was one of four strikes on the Russian capital in the space of a month, spotlighting Moscow’s vulnerability as Russia’s war in Ukraine drags into its second year.
The attempted drone strike followed a night of heavy clashes across Ukraine. The Ukrainian air force reported that Russian forces had launched 70 attack drones and air and sea missiles overnight on Sunday (local time).
The bombardment reportedly included cruise missiles launched from aircraft over the Caspian Sea and Iranian-made Shahed-136/131 strike UAVs.
Serhiy Tyurin, deputy head of Ukraine’s Khmelnytsky region military administration, said Russian missiles had damaged several buildings in the area, injuring one and sparking a fire in a warehouse. In Ukraine’s eastern Kupyan region, a 55-year-old man was hospitalised after missiles struck local houses and farm buildings. The attack also ignited a forest fire, officials said on social media.
In the Russian-held city of Donetsk, Ukrainian shelling also set alight the main building of the M Tugan-Baranovsky University of Economics and Trade, said the Moscow-installed head of the illegally annexed Donetsk People’s Republic, Denis Pushilin.
Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry said that the blaze caused the building’s roof to collapse, but that there were no casualties.
