On Thursday, Ukraine put together a major operation against the capital, one that left the city’s most active airport in a lurch with fires and roadblocks. Russian officials have tied it to an influx of hundreds of drones. It all happened in the hours before Vladimir Putin was to be in Kazan for some Southeast Asian leaders, which makes for some awkward timing and questions about what it says for the Kremlin’s image.
Air travel and city services disrupted
Sheremetyevo in Moscow had to put some restrictions on flights and, as they put it, put passengers in ‘safe locations’ during the lull. The mayor also said local authorities were shutting down roads in the vicinity of the MNPZ, or the Moscow Oil Refinery, once the drones made it there.
Then there was the matter of a drone that the region’s governor said went into an apartment block in Zhukovsky. A shopping centre on the edge of town had to deal with a fire from the remains of another one, not exactly what you want to see when you’re an emergency service in the middle of a day like this.
In short, here is what we are hearing from those in charge:
– Passengers at Sheremetyevo were put in ‘safe locations’
– No flying for a while during the barrage
– Some roads by the refinery are out of bounds
– A blaze at a mall
– An apartment in Zhukovsky was hit
What Russia is saying on defences and damage
Sergei Sobyanin, the mayor of Moscow, has his air defences busy fending off what he terms a large-scale push, with 180 of them put down. Over in the defence ministry, they have a different number: more than 500 Ukrainian drones taken out in the night across the whole of the country.
They won’t go into specifics on the state of the refinery, but the media in Russia is reporting it was ablaze. If you look at some of the unconfirmed clips on social media, you can see black smoke and the odd drone in the sky.
TASS, the state news outlet, is calling it the biggest thing to happen in Moscow in two years or more. They have had to cordon off some streets near important sites while their people work the scene.
The timing and the stakes
All of this was in the lead-up to an ASEAN summit in Kazan, some 700 kilometres (435 miles) to the east of where Putin is. He was to be in the company of prime ministers from places like Thailand, Vietnam and Malaysia, and the Philippines’ president, Ferdinand Marcos, among others.
It is a delicate position for the Kremlin, which has been trying to show it has things in hand during a long, hard war. Kyiv has been upping the ante with strikes on the kind of oil refineries that put money in Moscow’s pocket, while any talk of ending this four-plus year affair has gone nowhere.
Economy and the situation on the ground
The Russian economy has been on a war footing for as long as this has been going on, and now you have to add in inflation, a lack of workers and the cost of borrowing. It muddies the waters a bit for the story of strength they like to tell at home and abroad.
As for the fighting, it has been a bit of a stand-off this year. Ukraine has been ratcheting up its incursions, even as Russia has been pummelling them with its own waves of drones and missiles since 2022.
Where things stand
If you read between the lines of the official word, you get a sense of the scale of it:
– 180 downed in the area, per Sobyanin
– 500+ in a night, according to the defence ministry
– TASS: the most in a couple of years
– The refinery was on fire, say the papers
– More pressure from Kyiv on the refineries
US President Donald Trump was at a G7 in France earlier in the week and told Moscow to 'make a deal‘. It’s a sign of the world’s restlessness as these kinds of hiccups are no longer confined to the front line.
Putin has made it clear he has no interest in sitting down with Volodymyr Zelensky; his view is that the Donbas in the east will be taken. In the meantime, what is Europe’s worst conflict in a generation has already cost hundreds of thousands of lives and left swaths of the country in tatters.
So you have Russia with its air defences running and Kyiv keeping the heat on with long-range weapons. Not much of a let-up in sight. For now, Moscow has to put things right after a very public showing of force on a day when they had other things on the agenda.
