Moscow flights grounded by mass Ukrainian drone strike

UKRAINE launched a massive weekend wave of drone strikes on Russian targets in Crimea that forced closure of the main bridge from the mainland while flights had to be grounded after attacks near Moscow.

Car traffic was suspended over Crimea’s Kerch Strait Bridge for half an hour, Russian authorities announced on Saturday, without explaining why.

Meanwhile, Moscow’s Domodedovo, Vnukovo and Zhukovsky airports were forced to restrict flights for almost three hours after four Ukrainian drones were shot down near the Russian capital, the state aviation watchdog said.

Sergei Sobyanin, Moscow’s mayor, said a fifth drone, close to the Domodedovo airport, was later downed with no casualties or damage reported.

However, footage and images circulating on social media appeared to show a hole in the roof of a building at the airport. Elsewhere, a fireball erupted at an oil refinery in Slavyansk-on-kuban in Krasnodar Krai, south western Russia, after Ukraine’s sixth drone strike on a Russian oil facility in a week.

The Kremlin said it downed all 17 drones attacking Krasnodar “but a fire broke out as a result of the fall of one of the devices”, local Russian military intelligence said on Telegram. The blaze was extinguished a few hours later and preliminary reports said one worker was killed.

Russia’s defence ministry said another two drones were shot down over the Kaluga region, just south of Moscow, and the Yaroslavl region, north-east of the capital, in some of the most distant Ukrainian strikes of the war so far. More Ukrainian drones were downed over the Belgorod, Kursk and Rostov regions that border Ukraine.

Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, in his nightly video address, thanked his military forces and intelligence “for the new Ukrainian longrange capabilities”, adding “the Russian war machine has vulnerabilities that we can reach with our weapons”.