Ukraine has launched one of its largest drone attacks since the start of the war, causing a fire at a distribution warehouse near Moscow and killing at least six people overnight, according to Russian authorities.
The defence ministry in Moscow said it had shot down ۱,۴۷۸ Ukrainian drones in the past ۲۴ hours – the highest ever total claimed – in an escalating air war in which seven Ukrainians were also killed as Russia bombed ۱۳ locations inside the country.
A huge fire engulfed a ۲۵۰,۰۰۰ sq metre building near Podolsk, ۲۵ miles south of Moscow’s city centre, belonging to the Wildberries distribution company. The facility was disabled as a result, Ukraine’s military said.
Sergei Sobyanin, the mayor of Moscow, said ۶۰۰ drones targeted the Moscow region overnight, of which ۲۰۱ were destroyed. One person was reported killed in the region, while Ukraine said a second warehouse at nearby Domodedovo was also targeted.
The Russian news agency RIA Novosti reported that the figure was the largest daily total claimed by the defence ministry, exceeding a record that had been set only the day before, though the figure is probably exaggerated and could not be verified.
Experts said Russian numbers needed to be treated with caution but added that the scale of damage caused overnight nevertheless demonstrated how rapidly Ukraine had expanded its long-range attack capabilities in ۲۰۲۶.
Serhii Kuzan, the chair of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center, a thinktank, said Russian authorities “deliberately inflate their figures” to make exaggerated claims about the effectiveness of their air defence.
But he said that “against the backdrop of increased production of Ukrainian long-range drones and missiles, both the number of strikes and the scale of Ukrainian weaponry’s deployment are on the rise” as the war continues.
Kuzan argued that it was “quite possible” it was the largest-scale attack on the Moscow region, and it was “at least on a par” with the May strikes on an oil refinery in the Kapotnya area near Moscow.
A rapid development of largely homegrown technologies, including the Flamingo cruise missile and the FP-۱ long-range fixed-wing drone from Fire Point, have allowed Ukraine to bomb warehouses, oil refineries, ports and military facilities up to ۱,۵۰۰ miles from its border.
Ukraine can now almost match the deep-strike capability that Russia has had since the beginning of the war using large drones and cruise missiles, though it still does not possess the high-speed ballistic missiles fired frequently by Moscow.
At the same time, both sides’ air defences are stretched to the point of near exhaustion, leading to a rise in civilian casualties and worries that the impact of the conflict beyond the immediate frontlines will only increase into the winter.
Kuzan said: “With every successful strike, Russia’s economic and military capabilities are diminished, and the Kremlin faces a new dilemma: how to counter this in a war of attrition.”
In the past month, Kyiv has shifted focus to attacking facilities linked to Wildberries, used widely by businesses to support online retail. Ukraine says the warehouses are used by the military for logistics, though they also store stock sold by large and small Russian businesses.
Ukraine’s military said on Sunday it had disabled seven out of ۱۰ of the company’s largest warehouses in an effort to hurt the Russian economy and affect ordinary citizens financially, in a strike conducted with FP-۱ drones.
Five people were reported to have been killed in Russia’s southern Rostov region, which borders Ukraine, and the local governor said a further ۱۵۰ incoming drones had been destroyed. Ukraine said it had targeted a factory that produced rocket fuel in Kamensk-Shakhtinsky, causing a fire there.
Russian drone and missile attacks killed two people in the central city of Kryvyi Rih, while a Spanish F-۱۸ jet shot down what appeared to be a Russia drone that had crossed over the border into Romania.
The Spanish fighter was part of a Nato patrol mission and shot down the drone at about ۵am after it crossed into Romanian airspace. “The drone appears to be Russian,” a Nato military spokesperson said.
Andrey Vorobyov, the governor of the Moscow region, said the assault on the region was “one of the most massive drone attacks in recent memory”. Video footage on social media showed a fast fire raging across the Wildberries warehouse complex.
Russian attacks on Ukraine also killed two in the Sumy border region and three others across the country. A ballistic missile attack on Kyiv shortly before ۳am injured six and caused several fires in the capital.
A blaze caused by the attacks destroyed a large part of the Petrovka book market in the Obolonskyi district in Kyiv overnight, with some booksellers reporting they had lost their entire stock in the incident.
“There is nothing. Nobody has anything left,” said Natalya, a bookstore owner who was interviewed by Ukraine’s Hromadske website. “Everything burned down. I was selling foreign language [textbooks] for schoolchildren. We were waiting for September so that everyone would have textbooks … But what happened happened.”
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, praised the work of the country’s emergency services and accused the Russians of attacking ordinary people. “Wherever the Russians can reach with their ballistic missiles, they strike civilian infrastructure,” he said in a social media post.
Zelenskyy said Russia had launched more than ۱,۵۵۰ attack drones, nearly ۱,۵۶۰ guided aerial bombs and ۶۲ missiles at Ukrainian cities and communities over the past week, most of them ballistic missiles of various types.
Though Ukraine is effective at stopping slower-moving drones, it has little to no defence against high-speed ballistics, its stock of US-made Patriot interceptor missiles – the only weapons capable of knocking them out – having been run down.
