MOSCOW: Ukraine attacked Moscow on Wednesday with at least 11 drones that were shot down by air defences in what Russian officials called one of the biggest drone strikes on the capital since the war in Ukraine began in February 2022.

Some of the drones were shot down over the city of Podolsk, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said. The city in the Moscow region is some 38 km south of the Kremlin.

Russia’s defence ministry said its air defences destroyed a total of 45 drones over Russian territory, including 11 over the Moscow region, 23 over the border region of Bryansk, six over the Belgorod region, three over the Kaluga region and two over the Kursk region.

“This is one of the largest attempts to attack Moscow using drones ever,” Sobyanin said on the Telegram messaging app in the early hours of Wednesday. “The layered defence of Moscow that was created made it possible to successfully repel all the attacks from the enemy UAVs.”

‘Large-scale’ outages hit Telegram, WhatsApp in Russia

Along Moscow’s boulevards, the cafes, restaurants and shops of the capital — which has been carefully insulated from the war — were crowded with little sign of concern, while President Vladimir Putin met Chinese premier Li Qiang in the Kremlin.

Two Russian citizens said the foiled drone attack simply showed how well defended Moscow now was, and that Ukraine was “playing with fire” by attacking Russia both in Kursk and in Moscow.

Kyiv destroys pontoon bridge

Ukrainian forces are using US-manufactured Himars rocket systems to destroy pontoon bridges and engineering equipment in Russia’s Kursk region, Ukraine’s military said on Wednesday, targeting logistics in its major cross-border incursion.

Russian officials have said Ukraine has damaged or destroyed at least three bridges over the Seym River since Kyiv launched a major assault into western Russia on Aug 6 advancing up to 28-35 kilometres.

“Where do Russian pontoon bridges ‘disappear’ in the Kursk region? Operators ... accurately destroy them,” Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces said on Telegram messenger.

The statement said US-man­ufactured Himars rocket systems were used. It was first official statement from Kyiv that Western weapons are part of the unprecedented offensive. Washington has made no direct comment regarding the use of US-made weapons in Kursk region, while saying its policies had not changed and that Ukraine was defending itself from Russia’s attacks.

DDoS attack

Russian users of Telegram and WhatsApp had trouble accessing the messaging apps on Wednesday due to disruption the state communications monitoring service said was caused by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.

The service said the attack had been repelled and that the messaging networks were working normally again. Russian media said other sites, including Wikipedia, Skype and the social media platform Discord had also been affected.

“The disruption is related to a DDoS attack on Russian telecom operators,” the service said in a statement, without saying who might have been responsible.

Wednesday’s disruption to the messaging apps, which are widely popular in Russia, came weeks after Russian internet monitoring services reported a mass outage on the availability of video hosting site YouTube as Russian authorities step up criticism of the platform. Hundreds of Russian users of Signal reported glitches with the secure messenger app earlier this month.

Published in Dawn, August 22nd, 2024