Russia yesterday denounced a new Ukrainian drone attack aimed at Moscow and aborted by air defense systems. According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, its systems brought down five devices, two of which were near the Vnukovo airport, whose activity was interrupted for several hours.
“This morning an attempt by the Kyiv regime to carry out a terrorist attack with five unmanned aerial vehicles against targets in the Moscow Oblast and New Moscow was foiled,” said in a statement the department’s spokesman, the Lieutenant General Igor Konashenkov. The mayor of Moscow, Sergey Sobyanin, assured that there had been no casualties or injuries.
Two of the drones were intercepted near Valuyevo, a town in New Moscow or Greater Moscow, which are territories transferred to the Russian capital in 2012 in the most important project to expand the Russian capital, 30 kilometers south of west of the Kremlin.
The town, with less than 500 inhabitants, is only five kilometers from the Vnúkovo airport, which is why it was necessary to interrupt the activity for several hours and delay several flights.
Telegram channels 112 and Baza reported that around four in the morning a kamikaze drone had hit an administrative building at one of the military installations in Kubinka, a city of 22,000 inhabitants in the Moscow province 63 kilometers west of the capital, but had caused no damage or destruction.
Maria Zakhàrova, spokeswoman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, reported on Telegram that the attack had taken place in areas with civilian infrastructure. “The international community must realize that the United States, the United Kingdom and France, permanent members of the UN Security Council, finance the terrorist regime,” he accused.
Ukraine almost never publicly claims responsibility for attacks inside Russia or on Russian-controlled Ukrainian territory. On May 30, Moscow already suffered an attack by drones, which caused damage to several residential buildings. Weeks earlier, Russia had accused Ukraine of trying to kill Vladimir Putin when an attack hit the Kremlin itself, a fact that Kyiv denied.
On the other hand, the prominent Russian investigative journalist Yelena Milàixina, who works for Novaya Gazeta, a newspaper illegal in Russia, suffered a brutal beating yesterday in Chechnya, where she had to attend a trial. On the way from the airport to the capital, Grozny, unknown armed and hooded men stopped the car in which he was traveling with his lawyer, Aleksandr Némov. “They immobilized our driver, took him outside, tied me up, put me on my knees and put a gun to my head,” Milaixina told Mansur Soláiev, a Chechen human rights official.
Memorial, a human rights organization banned in Russia, said that Milaixina and Nemov had been “brutally trampled, even in the face, and threatened with death”. The attackers told the reporter: “You were warned. Get out of here and don’t write anything.”
The masked men then shaved Mylaishina’s head, broke several of her fingers and covered her head with a green dye, apparently zelionka, an antiseptic used in Russia. According to Memorial, the reporter lost consciousness several times. Nemov was stabbed.
Milàixina has spent years investigating human rights abuses in Chechnya. In 2020 she was assaulted in the same hotel where she was staying. Last year, the leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, called her a “terrorist” on social networks, so she decided to spend some time outside of Russia.
