Two Ukrainian combat drones headed for Moscow were shot down Wednesday in the latest targeting of the capital this week, Russian officials said, while Ukraine said a strike killed two people in the southern frontline city of Zaporizhzhia.
Zaporizhzhia, a key city on the Dnipro River, lies some 44 kilometres (27 miles) from the frontline.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky had initially announced on social media that at least three people had been killed in the strike.
His post was accompanied by a video showing a partially damaged church with fire in its courtyard and smoke rising.
But Interior Minister Igor Klymenko later revised the Zaporizhzhia toll to two dead and seven wounded.
“Fortunately, one person was reanimated,” he posted.
In Moscow, mayor Sergei Sobyanin said on Telegram that “two combat drones’ attempt to fly into the city was recorded. Both were shot down by air defence”.
One drone was downed in the Domodedovo area on the southern outskirts of the city, while the second was shot down in the Minsk highway area, west of the capital.
A separate explosion at a warehouse just outside the city left one dead and injured more than 50 people, according to officials, sending a plume of smoke into the air.
Spared during the early phase of the conflict, Moscow and its environs have seen a growing number of strikes in recent months.
The drone attack was at least the third near Moscow within a week. Russia said it downed Ukrainian drones Sunday in the Podolsky district on the capital’s outskirts, and again on Monday in the Kaluga region, further from the capital to the southwest.
On July 30, Zelensky warned that “war” was coming to Russia, with the country’s “symbolic centres and military bases” becoming targets.
Warehouse blast
The warehouse explosion struck the grounds of an optical equipment factory rocked the town of Sergiyev Posad, some 35 miles northeast of Moscow.
“One of the victims has passed away. Doctors are fighting for the lives of five others. They have extensive body burns,” the state-run TASS news agency quoted a source in a local hospital as saying.
Governor Andrey Vorobyov said that over fifty people sought medical help and that some people might still be under the rubble.
Video shared by state media showed a ball of flames bursting on the horizon, followed by a shockwave that blew out windows in some nearby buildings.
In the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, shelling killed a woman and a young girl, while another two were injured, the city’s Moscow-appointed mayor Alexei Kulemzin said on Telegram.
Meanwhile, the head of Russia’s southern Belgorod region said one person had been killed and four others injured by Ukrainian shelling on a town near the border.
The Moscow strike came a day after Russia claimed it had hit a Ukrainian army command post in a missile strike on the eastern city of Pokrovsk, leaving at least nine dead.
German spy?
Pokrovsk sits just 40 kilometres (25 miles) from the eastern frontline, where Ukrainian troops are pushing to break the Russian lines.
Ukraine began its long-awaited counteroffensive in June but has made only modest advances to the east and south in the face of stiff resistance from Russian forces.
Meanwhile, Russia has launched its own offensive around the city of Kupiansk in northeast Ukraine.
The city and its surrounding areas were liberated by Ukrainian forces last September, but Moscow has since renewed its assault on the region.
“The intensity of hostilities and enemy shelling is high” in the zone, Ukraine’s deputy defence minister Ganna Malyar said Wednesday.
Beyond the conflict in Ukraine, Moscow accused Poland and Finland of threatening its security and vowed a response to the multiplication of “threats” to Russia’s western frontier.
Finland, which shares a long border with Russia, has joined the US-led NATO alliance, while Poland has strengthened security on its border with Moscow’s close ally Belarus.
“Threats to the military security of the Russian Federation have multiplied in the western and northwestern strategic directions,” Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said at a meeting with military officials.
Those risks “require a timely and adequate response,” he added.
In Germany, prosecutors said a German national working for the military had been arrested on suspicion of spying for Russia, amid warnings of increased espionage activity by Moscow.
“The accused is strongly suspected of working for a foreign intelligence service,” the federal prosecutor’s office said.
