A Ukrainian drone barrage killed at least four people in weekend strikes inside Russia that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky described as a justified response to Moscow’s aerial attack on Kyiv days earlier.
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Ukraine has increased the frequency and intensity of long-range strikes targeting Russia’s military industrial complex in a bid to pressure Russian President Vladimir Putin to end his full-scale invasion. The strikes coincide with a reported increase in Ukraine’s momentum on the battlefield.
Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) said it had targeted military-industrial and fuel infrastructure in the Moscow region on Saturday, raising alarm among pro-Kremlin bloggers that the government is unable to protect the Russian capital.
“Kyiv’s intensified strikes are effectively bringing the war back to Russia,” Giorgi Revishvili, a military analyst and founder of the Russia Analyzed Substack, told Newsweek on Monday. “The raid on Moscow carries a significant psychological impact for the Russian public, as even heavily fortified Moscow, protected by layered air defense rings, can still be penetrated.”
Zelensky had posted a clip to X of what he said was a strike on a Russian facility, reported as the Moscow Oil Refinery, as he touted how Ukrainian drones had traveled over 500 kilometers from the country’s border into Russia.
“Russians should be thinking about their refineries, their oil facilities and enterprises,” he said in his nightly video address on Sunday.
Where Did Ukraine Strike?
The Russian defense ministry said that over the weekend around 600 Ukrainian drones had been launched into 14 Russian regions, as well as Crimea and the Black and Azov seas, but that air defenses downed or neutralized most of them.
A map by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) shows the areas across the Moscow region affected by the weekend’s strikes, which Ukraine’s General Staff said had been conducted in part using Ukrainian-developed RS-1, FP-1 and BARS-SM drones.
The targets included the Angstrem Semiconductor Plant, which produces microelectronics for weapons at the Elma Technopark in Zelenograd, northwest of central Moscow. A geolocated image on social media showed smoke at the site.
Ukraine also said it had struck the Solnechnogorsk oil pumping station, critical for fuel for the military. In addition, Ukrainian forces struck the Moscow Oil Refinery in Moscow’s Kapotnya district, according to the SBU, although Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said the attack did not disrupt the site’s operations.
Aurélien Colson, academic co-director of the ESSEC Business School Institute for Geopolitics & Business, said the strikes showed that Russia cannot keep the consequences of its war away from the Russian population.
“That does not mean Ukraine is suddenly winning militarily, but it does mean that Ukraine’s innovations are steadily eroding the old Russian assumption that geographic depth equals military safety,” he told Newsweek.
“That is why Ukraine’s home-grown long-range strike capability may be the real game-changer,” Colson said. “Ukrainian drones can now reach roughly a quarter of Russian territory, where about 70 percent of the population lives, with strikes already extending as far as the Urals.”
Andrei Vorobyov, Moscow’s regional governor, said Ukrainian drones hit infrastructure facilities and debris had damaged residential areas. Telegram channel Astra said drone wreckage had sparked a fire at a runway at Sheremetyevo International Airport and temporary airspace restrictions and flight diversions were reported. Residents of Mosscow’s Khimki, Lobnya and Naro-Fominsk districts also reported explosions.
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Vorobyov said a woman was killed when a drone hit her house and that the attacks claimed the lives of two men, while 17 people were injured. Another person was reportedly killed in Russia’s Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine.
Zelensky justified the attacks in a social media post that said Ukraine was responding to Russia’s attack on Kyiv on May 14 that killed at least 24 people, including three children and left at least 48 injured.
“Our responses to Russia’s prolongation of the war and strikes on our cities and communities are quite fair,” Zelensky wrote.
Russian Military Bloggers Angered
The Kremlin acknowledged the Ukrainian strikes, with Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov saying on Sunday in an interview that Moscow was open to dialogue with the European Union over the war.
However, while Russian state channels briefly reported the Ukrainian strikes it was up to the so-called Russian patriot Telegram channels to acknowledge Ukraine’s increasing strike capabilities, with criticism aimed at the perceived ineffectiveness of Russian air defenses.
One milblogger condemned shutdowns of mobile internet in the Russian capital as ineffective in curbing Ukrainian strikes. Others criticized Peskov’s response as inadequate and called for a unified air defense network and early-warning system around Moscow.
The ISW said the weekend’s strikes “proved that Russia is unable to effectively defend the Russian capital.”
“No air defense can fully protect such a vast space against repeated, relatively cheap, adaptable drone attacks,” Colson said. “Ukraine may not be breaking Russia at the front, but it is increasingly able to expose Russia’s vulnerability at home.”
Ukraine’s Growing Momentum
Zelensky’s evening address on Sunday also described how Ukraine had been conducting more active battlefield operations over the weekend as he touted a “visible” shift in momentum.
Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi said that momentum along the front line has shifted during a counteroffensive by Kyiv in which Ukrainian forces say they captured more territory in February than Russian troops.
Zelensky said Kyiv’s forces had liberated around 154 square miles of Russian-occupied territory in eastern parts of the Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk regions as of March, although this has not been independently confirmed.
“The strikes and battlefield gains give Ukraine additional leverage in negotiations amid constant waves of Russian propaganda insisting that Moscow will inevitably win, that Ukraine is losing the war, and therefore must cede territory,” Revishvili said.
He added: “Despite the significant challenges and vulnerabilities that remain for the Ukrainian Armed Forces in certain sectors along the frontline, at this stage of the war it can be cautiously stated that Kyiv is gradually beginning to turn the tide in its favor.”
