(LONDON) — Ukraine launched more than 400 drones into Russia overnight in its latest wave of long-range strikes, according to authorities in Moscow, and as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy vowed to expand such attacks as a means to pressure Russian President Vladimir Putin to end Moscow’s full-scale invasion of its neighbor.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said its forces downed at least 452 Ukrainian drones overnight. The craft, the ministry said on Telegram, were intercepted over 16 Russian regions — including Moscow — plus over Russian-occupied Crimea, as well as over both the Azov and Black seas.
At least 43 drones were downed while flying toward Moscow, the city’s Mayor Sergey Sobyanin said in a series of posts to Telegram.
Russia’s federal air transport agency, Rosaviatsiya, said in posts to Telegram that temporary flight restrictions were introduced at airports in Sochi, Krasnodar, Kaluga, Saratov, Penza, Nizhny Novgorod, Yaroslavl and Cheboksary.
All four of Moscow’s international airports — Vnukovo, Sheremetyevo, Domodedovo and Zhukovsky — were also put under flight restrictions during the overnight attacks.
Zelenskyy said in posts to social media that Kyiv’s long-range strike campaign into Russia — the scale and intensity of which has been steadily increasing during the course of Moscow’s full-scale invasion of its neighbor — would evolve further.
“When our deep strikes were not reaching Moscow and St. Petersburg, Putin did not think much about it. He understood that the war was far from the Kremlin. Of course, once he feels what is happening in Moscow, he will begin to understand what is happening in the Kursk, Belgorod, and Bryansk regions. He’ll begin to grasp the reality of the situation,” Zelenskyy said, referring to Russian border regions which regularly come under Ukrainian attack.
“When not one hundred drones but a thousand start reaching Moscow, and when he feels it and sees it, he will be advised to move somewhere beyond the Urals. That will be a moment that opens a new chapter on the path toward ending the war. The farther Putin is from Moscow, the closer the end of the war and peace will be,” Zelenskyy added.
The Ukrainian leader also suggested that Kyiv’s expanding drone attacks would unsettle Russian elites, further undermining Putin’s Kremlin.
“He fears for his life,” Zelenskyy said of the Russian leader. “And then there are the elites. Where do the Russian elites live? Moscow and St. Petersburg — the two major cities. Those places will be reached, because that is where they make the decisions to kill us.”
“That is why deep strikes have had, and continue to have, a major impact. We must keep working on this,” Zelenskyy wrote.
Russia continued its own long-range strike campaign into Ukraine on Monday night into Tuesday. Ukraine’s air force said Russia launched 123 drones into the country in its latest wave, of which 108 drones were shot down or suppressed. Twelve drones impacted across 10 locations, the air force said.
Those attacks followed a series of missile and drone strikes on Ukraine on Sunday night and early on Monday morning, in which at least 22 people were killed in the capital Kyiv and in the surrounding region, according to Ukrainian officials.
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