Russia says it shot down three Ukrainian drones trying to attack Moscow

MOSCOW, Jul 30 (Reuters) – Russia’s Defense Ministry said it shot down three Ukrainian drones early on Sunday that were trying to attack Moscow.

No one was injured and there was only minor damage to the facade of two office buildings in the Moskva-Citi business district, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said.

The area, several miles from the Kremlin, is known for its modern high-rise towers and one of the damaged buildings housed three Russian government ministries as well as residential apartments, Russian media reported.

The fact that hostile drones have begun to reach the heart of the Russian capital in recent months, even if they do not cause serious damage, makes authorities uncomfortable, who have told the public that Russia is in full control of what they call their “special “. military operation” against Ukraine.

The incident followed what Russia said was a similar attempt by Ukraine attacking Moscow with two drones last Monday, one of which was shot down near the Defense Ministry headquarters. There was talk at the time of taking harsh retaliatory measures against Ukraine.

Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said after Monday’s attempted attack that there would be more drone strikes. There was no immediate reaction from kyiv to the latest incident.

“There were no casualties or injuries,” Sobyanin, the mayor, said in a brief statement on the incident.

Flights to and from Moscow’s Vnukovo airport were briefly suspended due to the incident, the TASS news agency reported.

The Defense Ministry said two drones crashed in the Moskva-Citi district after being shot down using radio-electronic equipment. Air defenses had shot down one more in the air over the Odintsovo area in the Moscow region, he said.

“On the morning of July 30, an attempted terrorist attack by the Kiev regime using unmanned aerial vehicles against targets in the city of Moscow was thwarted,” the ministry said in its statement.

Separately, he said he had also successfully thwarted a nighttime attack on the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014, by 25 Ukrainian drones that he said he had shot down or forced to crash. No one was injured or harmed in the Crimean episode, she said.

GLASS AND WASTE

A young woman who gave her name only as Liya described the Moscow incident. “My friends and I rented an apartment to come here and relax, and at some point we heard an explosion and it was like a wave, everyone jumped,” she told Reuters.

“And then there was a lot of smoke and you couldn’t see anything. From above, you could see fire.”

Some glass panels in a high-rise building were blown off and glass and debris covered part of the pavement below, according to a Reuters reporter at the scene, which had been cordoned off by police and emergency services.

Two drones landed in the Kremlin in May in the highest-profile incident of its kind.

Reporting by Andrew Osborn in Moscow and Rishabh Jaiswal in Bengaluru Editing by William Mallard, Lincoln Feast and Frances Kerry

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