Drone hits Moscow tower housing ministries for second time, says mayor

A high-rise building in Moscow housing Russian government ministries has been hit by a drone for the second time in three days, the city’s mayor has said, as a Ukrainian presidential adviser said the Kremlin should expect more drone attacks and “more war”.

The Russian defence ministry said two drones were destroyed by air defence systems in the Odintsovo and Naro-Fominsk districts near Moscow in a fresh wave of attacks on Tuesday, while it claimed a third was jammed and went “out of control” before it crashed in the Moscow City business district, a cluster of glass skyscrapers that was built to show Russia’s growing integration into world financial markets. The ministry blamed Ukraine for what it called an “attempted terrorist attack”.

Photos and video showed that a drone had ripped off part of the facade of a modern skyscraper, IQ-Quarter, 3.4 miles (5.5km) from the Kremlin, which houses staff from several ministries, including Russia’s ministry of digital development, communications and mass media.

“The facade of the 21st floor was damaged. The glazing of 150 sq metres was broken,” the Moscow mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, said in a Telegram post, adding that no injuries had been reported.

Ukraine has not formally admitted it was behind the strikes on Sunday and early on Tuesday, though they appear to be part of a growing strategy to bring home the consequences of Vladimir Putin’s war to Russia’s civilian population.

The Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak suggested in a tweet on Tuesday that the Russian capital, whose residents have largely been able to ignore the devastation being meted out on a daily basis in Ukraine, was experiencing payback.

“Moscow is rapidly getting used to full-fledged war, which, in turn, will soon finally move to the territory of the ‘authors of the war’ to collect all their debts. Everything that will happen in Russia is an objective historical process.

“More unidentified drones, more collapse, more civil conflicts, more war …” he wrote.

Russia’s economy ministry said its employees were working remotely after the latest attack. Moscow’s Vnukovo airport was also temporarily shut and flights redirected.

The Moscow City district towers, often unoccupied at night, are located further from the Kremlin than other highly defended government targets such as the ministry of defence, where Russia had stationed a Pantsir S-1 air defence system on the roof last year, and present a large, tall target.

In a video address on Sunday, the Ukrainian president, Volodymr Zelenskiy, made the same point as Podolyak as he said the war was coming home to Russia after three drones were shot down over Moscow.

“Gradually, the war is returning to the territory of Russia – to its symbolic centres and military bases. This is an inevitable, natural and absolutely fair process,” Zelenskiy said.

The attacks on Tuesday marked at least the fifth time that unmanned aerial vehicles have reached the Russian capital since May, when two drones came down over the Kremlin. Moscow and its surrounding area are more than 500km from the Ukrainian border and the conflict there.

While the damage so far has been relatively minor, the attacks appear designed to show up Moscow’s vulnerability to drone warfare. Ukrainian bloggers on Tuesday ironically repeated claims made in April by the commander of Russia’s air defences, Lieut Gen Andrey Demin.

“There is hardly a better sky shield anywhere in the world than Moscow,” Demin assured a Russian newspaper.

The Russian defence ministry said on Tuesday that it had also foiled a Ukrainian drone attack targeting patrol boats in the Black Sea.

The attack on Moscow came as Russia launched its own drone strike, on Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, injuring one person. Five Iranianmade Shahed drones were deployed, Ukrainian officials said.

Two floors of a college dormitory were destroyed and set on fire as Russia targeted “densely populated” areas of the north-eastern city, the mayor, Ihor Terekhov, said on Telegram on Tuesday, adding that three explosions had been heard in the city.

The chief of police in Kharkiv, Volodymyr Tymoshko, said there were two night-time strikes – one on the college and one on the city centre. One person was injured in the city centre.

It was unclear whether anyone was in the college building when it was struck, with local media initially saying it was empty and later reporting one person had been inside.