Ukraine launches massive drone attack as Russia votes

Ukraine fired more than 1,000 drones at Russia overnight, including hundreds aimed at Moscow, in what the Russian capital’s mayor called the “largest ever” attack on the city as Russia completed the final day of parliamentary elections.

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said 450 drones were destroyed on their way to the capital. He said the attack damaged the Moscow Oil Refinery and a residential building, describing the strike as an “unprecedented attack” intended to disrupt the vote. “The enemy failed in this regard,” he said.

Across the wider Moscow region, two people were killed and 20 were wounded, local Gov. Andrei Vorobyov said. He identified the dead as a 74-year-old man and a 44-year-old woman.

Russia’s Ministry of Defense said its forces shot down Ukrainian drones across the country, as well as over Crimea and the waters of the Black Sea. CBS News reported the ministry put the total at 1,110 drones, while NPR reported the ministry said 1,100 were shot down.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on social media that Kyiv used a range of missiles and drones in the attack, including Ukraine’s domestically made Flamingo and Pelican missiles, to target oil and logistics facilities. “These are billions of dollars that sustain the war machine,” Zelenskyy said, referring to the economic pressure Ukraine is seeking to place on Russia.

The strikes came as Russia held its first wartime parliamentary election, a vote described in the source reports as virtually devoid of opposition to President Vladimir Putin’s policies and all but certain to cement the Kremlin’s dominance. Russia also held voting in the four Ukrainian regions that Moscow illegally annexed after the war began but still does not fully control, as well as in Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula Russia illegally annexed in 2014. Kyiv has denounced those votes as illegal.

Ukraine has increasingly relied on domestically produced long-range drones and missiles to strike deep inside Russia since Moscow’s invasion more than four years ago. The attacks are part of Kyiv’s effort to make the Russian public feel the consequences of the war and to pressure Putin into negotiating a peace settlement. Putin has shown no signs that he intends to stop the invasion.

At the same time, Ukraine continued to face Russian attacks. Zelenskyy said a Russian drone strike hit a monastery in Ukraine’s Kherson region Saturday, killing a member of the clergy and wounding four people. A separate Russian attack on the Ukrainian capital killed two children and their mother Saturday evening, according to Tymur Tkachenko, head of the Kyiv regional state administration. Tkachenko later said another child wounded in that attack died in a hospital Sunday.

The U.S. State Department said Friday it had approved a potential $2.68 billion sale of air defense equipment to Ukraine, CBS News reported. The announcement came as U.S. President Donald Trump signed a bill introducing new sanctions designed to pressure Russia over the war, after Congress approved the measure following months of delay.

The conflict has increasingly become a duel of long-range aerial strikes. Fighting along the roughly 1,250-kilometer, or 780-mile, front line in eastern and southern Ukraine has slowed, constrained by large numbers of drones and ground robots threatening troop movements.