By Editor-Tuesday, August 2nd, 2023.
Russian forces claim to have again downed several drones over the city of Moscow, according to officials, with one of the intercepted aircraft hitting the exact same office tower that was hit in an another attack over the weekend.
The Russian defence ministry, in a message on Telegram on Tuesday, said its anti-aircraft units had “thwarted a terrorist attack by the Kyiv regime” and downed two drones in the suburbs west of the city centre.
However not all the drones have been intercepted and Russia said a drone hit the same building in central Moscow for the second time in 48 hours, blaming Ukraine, which has made it increasingly clear it would target symbolic and military-related sites deep inside Russia.
But another drone, having been “hit by radio-electronic equipment and, having run out of control, crashed on the territory of the complex of non-residential buildings” in Moscow City, the ministry said, referring to a business district in the capital.
Earlier, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said the building hit on Tuesday was the same one struck in a drone attack on Sunday.
“One flew into the same tower at the Moskva City complex hit previously. The facade has been damaged on the 21st floor. Glazing was destroyed over 150 square metres,” he said.
“There is no information on casualties,” he added.
The attack on Tuesday is the latest in a series of recent drone assaults – including on the Kremlin and Russian towns near the border with Ukraine – that Moscow has blamed on Kyiv.
The Kremlin said that the drone attacks were “an act of desperation” by Kyiv due to setbacks on the battlefield in Ukraine.
Ukraine does not generally confirm or deny responsibility for attacks within Russia’s borders, but President Volodymyr Zelensky and other top officials have signaled in recent days that strikes inside Russia are part of Kyiv’s strategy. Video of the overnight attacks early Tuesday strongly suggested that a drone used in the attack was one of the Ukrainian-made long-range models identified by The New York Times.
Notably, the Russian news Website Sputnik International has little to say about the drone attacks on Moscow other than that they were successfully intercepted.
Sources: New York Times, Al Jazeera,
