Ukraine Sent More Than a Thousand Drones at Russia in One Night, Hit Moscow's Refinery, and Did It on Election Day

The last day of Russia's three-day parliamentary election began with the largest drone attack Moscow has faced in four and a half years of war. Ukraine launched more than a thousand drones at Russia overnight into Sunday, around 450 of them at the capital, and Sergei Sobyanin, the city's mayor, called it "unprecedented" and the largest ever on Moscow. The Gazpromneft refinery at Kapotnya in the south-east of the city, one of the largest in the country by volume and one of the plants that supplies the capital's fuel, was hit; so was a residential building. Across the wider Moscow region two people were killed, a man of 74 and a woman of 44, and twenty were wounded. Russia's defence ministry said its air defences had shot down 1,110 drones over Russia, Crimea and the Black Sea, along with eight guided bombs, eight cruise missiles and four rockets. Kyiv did not confirm a number. The Associated Press account is carried by PBS.

What Kyiv says it was doing

Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the strike used Ukraine's Flamingo and Pelican missiles alongside the drones and was aimed at oil and logistics: "billions of dollars that sustain the war machine". The Ukrainian general staff named the Moscow refinery as the main target. The choice of night was not accidental. Sobyanin's other remark, that "the enemy failed in this regard", referred to the election, which Russia's central commission says United Russia is winning with about 57.5 per cent in a contest with no opposition to Vladimir Putin's war on the ballot. Ukraine has spent the summer building a long-range drone and missile industry that can now put a thousand airframes over Russia in a night; the refinery campaign that began in 2024 has become a strategic bombing campaign in all but name.

What Russia did the same weekend

On Saturday night Russian drones killed a mother and her two three-year-old children in the Kyiv region; a third child died in hospital on Sunday, and Reuters' count for the region was four dead. A Russian drone hit a monastery in Kherson region, killing a member of the clergy and wounding four. Zelenskyy also said Russian drones had entered Moldovan airspace twice during his visit there last week, a fortnight after a drone struck a locomotive on the Kyiv to Warsaw line. NPR has the Kherson and Kyiv accounts. On the same day the UN human rights office published its tally of verified conflict-related sexual violence since February 2022: 1,004 cases, 89 per cent of them attributed to Russian forces.

Washington

Zelenskyy spoke to Trump on Sunday and the two will meet in New York on Tuesday during the General Assembly; Rustem Umerov, Kyiv's chief negotiator, is coordinating with the White House envoys. Trump signed the Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act, Lindsey Graham's bill targeting energy, defence industry and the shadow fleet, and the State Department approved a 2.7 billion dollar sale to Ukraine for air-defence upgrades. Slovakia's Robert Fico said Western politicians were looking for a NATO-Russia conflict after a "failed" Ukraine strategy, which is what he says most weeks. And Reuters reported that Putin's envoy Kirill Dmitriev is preparing to meet Germany's AfD leadership next year about restoring gas, a day after that party won a German state. The war's front line has not moved much this month. Its reach has: a thousand drones over Moscow on polling day is a message about what a winter of this looks like, and it was sent to a capital that spent the weekend voting for more of it.