Moscow mayor says 650 Ukrainian drones targeted region overnight
Sergei Sobyanin says the overnight strike marks a sharp jump in scale from recent refinery and shipping attacks
Published
Russia's defence ministry said it would intensify strikes on Kyiv and other regions, tying the threat to President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's pledge to keep hitting Russian oil refineries. Zelenskiy said Ukrainian forces would continue striking refineries rather than civilian targets, and said troops had stabilised the front near Donetsk under an operation called Vivaldi.
Ukrainian officials said Russian strikes killed at least six people across Ukraine and damaged a bridge in Kyiv. Moscow said it would keep up what it called mass retaliatory strikes.
The scale of the overnight drone attack is a sharp escalation from the refinery and shipping strikes that have defined recent weeks. It comes after the Kremlin said in late September that conditions for talks were not ready, and after it vowed this month to carry out mass retaliatory strikes on Kyiv. The attack also runs against Zelenskiy's earlier offer of mutual restraint on strikes against capital cities, a sign that neither side is pulling back even as separate talks continue over Witkoff-Kushner diplomacy and Lukoil's frozen assets. The size of the strike raises the odds that Moscow follows through on its retaliation pledge rather than returning to the stalled diplomatic track.