Russian authorities said on Sunday that a large-scale Ukrainian drone attack on Moscow and its surrounding region killed at least two people and damaged a major oil refinery on the final day of the country’s parliamentary elections.
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said more than 1,600 drones had been intercepted since Saturday, 450 of them heading for the capital. He described the assault as an “unprecedented attack” planned to disrupt the vote. “The enemy did not succeed,” he wrote on Telegram.
Moscow regional governor Andrey Vorobyov said a 44-year-old woman and an elderly man were killed in two separate locations, with six people injured. A drone crashing into a 21-storey building triggered a fire that forced the evacuation of 400 residents.
Sobyanin said a facility at the Moscow oil refinery was damaged, with emergency services on the scene. The refinery has been struck by Ukrainian strikes in recent months, part of a broader Kyiv campaign against Russian energy infrastructure.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Kyiv had hit a “key” Russian oil facility and a logistics site. “These are billions of dollars that sustain the war machine,” he posted on X.
The strikes came during a tightly controlled three-day election, the first parliamentary vote since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Only parties supporting the Kremlin’s military campaign were registered to run, and Moscow organised voting in occupied areas of Ukraine. The head of Russia’s Central Election Commission said a drone attack on a civilian bus killed two people, including an election official, in a Russian-occupied part of the Kherson region.
In Ukraine, authorities reported deaths from overnight Russian attacks. A woman and her two three-year-old children died when a drone hit a home in the Kyiv region, the emergency service said, while a girl died in hospital after a separate strike. In the Sumy region, four people were killed when a drone hit their car. This followed recent Russian drone strikes on Kyiv-area fuel sites that also claimed lives.
Both sides have intensified long-range strikes on energy and transport targets in recent weeks, despite US President Donald Trump saying on Monday that Russia and Ukraine had agreed not to hit each other’s energy facilities. Trump signed a sanctions bill on Friday allowing tariffs of up to 100% on major buyers of Russian oil and gas, including China and India.
Flights were halted overnight at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo and Vnukovo airports. Restrictions at both were lifted by Sunday morning, though each warned some flights may still be delayed.