Two killed in Moscow region as Ukraine sends more than 650 drones

Two people were killed and others injured overnight in the Moscow region as Ukraine launched one of the largest drone waves of the war toward the capital. Governor Andrei Vorobyov said the body of a 71-year-old man was pulled from the rubble of a house, and that a 20-year-old man was killed in a nearby village.

The Moscow Times Russian service, citing the governor, placed the older man in Barybino, in the Domodedovo area, where a private house was destroyed. One woman at the same site was hurt. The 20-year-old died in the settlement of Radumlya, in the Solnechnogorsk district. A man with shrapnel wounds was taken to hospital from Pokrovskoye in the Volokolamsk district. Vorobyov later put the injured at seven in one account carried by Reuters, and local reporting put the injured at nine. The gap is the sort that usually closes when a health ministry, rather than a governor's night note, publishes a single list.

Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said Ukraine had launched more than 650 drones toward Moscow between 8.30pm on Monday and 5am on Tuesday. He said most were shot down. His city updates counted 161 drones destroyed on the approaches to Moscow itself. Vorobyov said 185 were destroyed or brought down over the surrounding region. The two figures are not a contradiction if they cover different rings of airspace. They are a contradiction if they are meant as the same tally. Neither office has published a single map of impact points.

Damage on the ground is more concrete. Vorobyov said 47 houses, four apartments and three cars were hit. The Moscow Times account listed 47 private houses across seven towns: Volokolamsk, Stupino, Dmitrov, Naro-Fominsk, Serpukhov, Domodedovo and Istra. Debris also fell on power lines, and some districts lost electricity. That pattern, a wide scatter of falling wreckage rather than a single crater, fits a defence that is shooting drones down over suburbs instead of stopping them at the border.

The military target inside the wave is the part Russian officials have been slower to name. War blogger Yuri Podolyaka said an oil storage tank was hit at the Volodarskaya oil storage and distribution facility, which he described as the largest in the Moscow region. Reuters carried that account and attributed it to military bloggers, not to the defence ministry. A confirmed hit on Volodarskaya would matter more for fuel logistics than the house count. Moscow's road and aviation fuel does not come from a suburb in Domodedovo. It comes from depots like that one. Until Transneft or the regional emergency ministry confirms a tank fire, the blogger's report stays one source.

The strike follows a period in which Russia has intensified its own attacks on Kyiv, including daytime waves and strikes on bridges across the Dnipro. Ukraine has spent the same months hitting refineries and depots far from the front. A 650-drone night against the capital region is the large end of that campaign. It is also expensive. Each airframe that does not reach a depot still has to be replaced, and each one that is shot down can still kill someone when the wreckage falls on a house in Barybino.

The two dead are not abstract. One was 71, under the rubble of his own house. One was 20, in Radumlya. The open question for Tuesday is whether Volodarskaya lost a tank, and whether the governor's injury count settles at seven or nine once the hospitals file. Those two numbers decide if the night was a terror raid on suburbs or a raid on a fuel hub that also hit suburbs.