MOSCOW — The drones kept coming for hours.
Between Monday evening and dawn on Tuesday, Ukraine launched more than 650 drones toward Moscow and the surrounding region, according to the city’s mayor Sergei Sobyanin. Russian air defenses shot down most of them, he said, with 105 intercepted on the final approach to the capital. By every available account, it was one of the largest single aerial attacks on Moscow since Russia’s full-scale invasion began more than four years ago.
Not all of them were stopped.
In the Moscow region that rings the capital, Governor Andrei Vorobyov said two people were killed and nine more injured overnight. A 71-year-old man was pulled from the rubble of a destroyed house. A 20-year-old was found dead in a nearby village. Vorobyov said 185 drones were destroyed or brought down over his region, damaging 47 houses, four apartments and three cars. A warehouse operated by Russian e-commerce giant Wildberries caught fire, according to the state news agency TASS. Around Domodedovo, south of the capital and home to one of Moscow’s three major airports, local officials were working through Tuesday to restore electricity to villages knocked out of power.
Sheremetyevo, the country’s largest airport, suspended operations temporarily as the attack continued into the morning.
The most strategically significant hit may have come at the Volodarskaya oil pumping and dispatch station near the village of Konstantinovo, in the Ramensky district roughly 40 kilometers from central Moscow. Open-source analysts who geolocated footage of the blaze identified the site as the largest oil storage facility in the Moscow region — a branch of the state pipeline monopoly Transneft that moves about three million tonnes of petroleum products a year. It stores diesel, gasoline and jet fuel, and feeds directly into the supply chains of all three of Moscow’s main airports. Russian military bloggers said two storage tanks were burning. Russian officials have not confirmed the facility was hit, and Reuters said it could not immediately verify the footage.
Kyiv has not commented on the attack.
The strike fits a pattern that has been building for months. Ukraine has systematically targeted Russian oil refineries, depots and export terminals to choke the revenue Moscow uses to finance the war — and, Kyiv says, to degrade the fuel supply of Russia’s own military. Ukraine’s defence ministry said late on Sunday that its long-range strikes had put more than half of Russia’s oil refining capacity out of action, naming facilities in Moscow, Yaroslavl, Ust-Luga, Perm, Saratov and Syzran. That claim could not be independently verified.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said Ukraine is ready for an energy ceasefire — if Russia stops striking Ukraine’s own facilities. It has not. And Moscow has said it plans to step up strikes on infrastructure targets, including in Kyiv, as winter approaches.
Why this matters: energy infrastructure has quietly become the front line of this war. The ground war along the 1,200-kilometer front has largely ground to a halt, so both sides are hitting what powers the other — refineries, depots, substations, fuel pipelines. Ukraine’s ability to send 650 drones hundreds of kilometers into Russian territory in a single night shows how far its long-range strike program has come, and it directly threatens the fuel logistics of the Moscow aviation hub. With winter approaching and both sides openly threatening heavier strikes on energy targets, civilians on both sides of the border are increasingly the ones in the blast radius.
