Over the weekend, Ukraine launched its largest drone assault on Moscow since the start of the war in February 2022. It deployed more than 500 drones in coordinated waves that kept Russian air defenses firing through the night and into the morning. Targets included military-industrial plants and fuel infrastructure across Moscow Oblast. The strikes hit a semiconductor plant, a sanctioned facility supplying components to Russia’s war machine, along with the Moscow Oil Refinery and two fuel pumping stations.The scale of this attack was also apparent in the debris from drones that Russian forces were able to shut down. This debris landed across multiple residential districts, killing at least three people in the Moscow region. Sheremetyevo Airport, Russia’s busiest air hub, reported debris on its grounds, while around 200 flights were delayed or canceled.This is a big victory for Ukraine.
For more than four years, Russia has broadly kept its population insulated from the consequences of Vladimir Putin’s decisions. At the same time, Ukrainian cities such as Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipro, Odesa, have all absorbed heavy missile and drone barrages that kill civilians in their apartments, destroy energy infrastructure through winters, and keep entire populations in a state of perpetual crisis. As long as Moscow’s population experienced this war as something distant, the Kremlin was confident it would face only limited domestic pressure to seek a genuine settlement. Ukraine’s latest attacks will help change those calculations.
