Zelenskyy says large Ukrainian drone attack that killed four in Russia is ‘justified’

A building burns following a Ukrainian air attack at an undisclosed location in the Moscow region. Photo / AFP

A wave of almost 600 Ukrainian drones attacked Russia overnight, killing four people and injuring many more, authorities said on Sunday.

The Russian defence ministry said that 556 drones were shot down across the country, with another 30 drones intercepted after dawn in one of the largest Ukrainian barrages of the ongoing conflict so far.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called the attack an “entirely justified” retribution for Moscow’s own strikes on Kyiv that killed at least 24 people.

He said: “Our responses to Russia’s prolongation of the war and its attacks on our cities and communities are entirely justified. This time, Ukrainian long-range sanctions reached the Moscow region, and we are clearly telling the Russians: their state must end its war.”

At the weekend, AFP journalists were granted rare access to an undisclosed location from where Ukraine launched its long-range drones, in what turned out to be one of the conflict’s largest attacks on Russia.

Battalion members prepared the plane-like drones before they whooshed towards Russia, leaving trails of sparks and flames behind.

The Ukrainian defence ministry said that Moscow and the surrounding region “have experienced the largest-scale attack since the full-scale invasion began” in February 2022.

In Russia’s capital region, “a woman was killed as a result of a UAV hitting a private house”, governor Andrey Vorobyov posted on Telegram, adding that the early morning attack also claimed the lives of two men.

One of the victims was an Indian citizen working in Russia, the Indian embassy in Moscow said in a statement.

Within the capital, one of the strikes wounded construction workers at a job site near an oil and gas refinery, mayor Sergei Sobyanin said.

He added: “Refinery production has not been disrupted. Three residential buildings were damaged.”

While the capital region is often subjected to drone attacks, the city of Moscow, around 400km from the Ukrainian border, is less frequently targeted.

Diplomatic efforts to end the conflict have been at a standstill, with Kyiv unwilling to accept Moscow’s demands for territory in the eastern Donbas region, saying it would be tantamount to surrender.

While the United States has pushed for both sides to come to the negotiating table, the talks have noticeably stalled since Washington’s attention turned to the US-Israeli war on Iran in late February.

After the expiration of a US-brokered three-day truce to mark the anniversary of victory over Nazi Germany in World War II – which both sides accused the other of violating – Moscow and Kyiv have returned to trading attacks.

In response to daily bombardments by the Russian military for more than four years, Ukraine has regularly struck within Russia.

Kyiv frequently claims long-range strikes that it says target oil processing facilities in a bid to dent the oil revenues that fund Russia’s war chest.

The latest attack on Sunday hit “the Moscow Oil Refinery, the Solnechnogorsk oil depot, and several microelectronics manufacturing facilities for the first time”, Ukraine’s defence ministry said on social media.

- AFP