Moscow targeted with hundreds of drones

Ukraine has targeted Moscow and the surrounding region in a large-scale attack that involved hundreds of drones.

The attack killed at least three people and damaged what Ukraine's president, VolodymyrZelenskyy, said was one of Russia's "key oil industry facilities" on the final day of the country's parliamentary elections, authorities said on Sunday, The Guardian reports.

Zelenskyy said that among the weapons used in the attack was the Pelican, initially thought to be a short-range ballistic missile, but was later said by sources to be a winged drone.

The president did not offer any further details, prompting media reporting in Ukraine that it was a ballistic missile, only for doubt to be cast on the weapon identification later in the day.

Zelenskyy also said Ukraine had used its domestically produced Flamingo cruise missiles to strike Moscow. The long-range weapon has previously been used against targets deep inside Russia and has the range to reach the country's capital.

Ukrainian and Russian Telegram channels posted images of what they said was debris from a Flamingo missile found in the Moscow region, though the

 claims could not be independently verified. RuslanLeviev, the head of the open-source investigation group Conflict Intelligence Team, said the debris probably came from a Flamingo missile.

Moscow's mayor, Sergey Sobyanin, said that more than 1,600 drones had been intercepted and shot down, 450 of which were aimed at Moscow, though these figures are often exaggerated, and Ukraine's daily drone fire rate estimated a number in the low hundreds.

Sobyanin accused Ukraine of attempting to interfere with a tightly controlled three-day election in Russia that is expected to tighten Vladimir Putin's 26-year grip on power.

"The unprecedented attack was clearly planned with the aim of disrupting the elections. The enemy did not succeed," he said on Telegram.
At least three people were killed, including a 44-year-old woman and an elderly man, in separate incidents.

A fire triggered by a drone crashing into a 21-storey building also led to 400 people being evacuated, said Moscow's regional governor, AndreyVorobyov, without specifying the drone's origin.

Kyiv has stepped up its campaign of long-range drone strikes against Russia in recent months, particularly against energy infrastructure, a vital source of the Kremlin's revenue to fund its war effort.

Ukrainian strikes have knocked out a significant part of Russia's oil-refining capacity, triggering oil product shortages, fuel price increases and long queues at filling stations in many regions across the country's 11 time zones.