The Russian capital has become a regular target of Ukraine’s drone strikes in recent weeks. One of these drones reached the center of the Russian capital on Friday. Intercepted by Russian defenses, the remains of the device damaged a non-residential building in the Moscow Exhibition Center, Expocenter.
The Russian Defense Ministry assured that its air defense systems “managed to make the aircraft change trajectory.” It ended up falling on the Krasnoprésnenskaya embankment, next to the Expocenter and about three kilometers from the Russian government headquarters, a building known as the White House.
The mayor of the city, Sergei Sobyanin, assured that the remains of the drone did not cause any victims or fires.
The incident occurred at four in the morning, 1:00 GMT, three o’clock in Barcelona.
The emergency services told the Tass agency that in one of the pavilions of the exhibition center one of its outer walls partially collapsed.
As in previous attacks, the Moscow airport most exposed to drones coming from Ukrainian territory, Vnukovo, which is located southwest of Moscow, took action again. Its airspace was closed for an hour. At that time, four flights that had to land at its facilities were diverted to the airports of Saint Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod and Minsk (the capital of neighboring Belarus).
Drone strikes against Russian or Russian-controlled territories have increased in recent weeks. The last one against Moscow took place on August 11. On that occasion, according to Defense, it was shot down by means of electronic warfare in the west of the capital.
Military hostilities in the conflict in Ukraine have also made the Crimean peninsula, annexed by Russia in 2014, and the Black Sea a target for Kyiv drones. In this area, the Russian Ministry of Defense assured this Friday that it had disrupted an attack with a drone against its fleet.
The Ukrainian drone, according to the ministry, was directed against patrol boats that “fulfilled navigation control tasks in the southwestern part of the Black Sea.
Russia has the headquarters of its Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol. On August 10, Russian air defenses shot down 11 drones near this city, the largest in Crimea.
Ukraine does not usually comment on or acknowledge attacks carried out on Russian territory or in Crimea.
