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Russia accuses Ukraine of a drone attack on Moscow
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Russian authorities have accused Kyiv of another drone attack on Moscow. Russian shelling in Ukraine hits a medical facility, killing a doctor, officials say.
By DASHA LITVINOVA
Associated Press
Aug. 1, 2023 2:33 PM PT
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TALLINN, Estonia —
A drone attacked a skyscraper in central Moscow early Tuesday for the second time in about 48 hours, damaging the building’s facade and further underscoring the Russian capital’s vulnerability. Russian authorities accused Kyiv of staging the assault.
An advisor to President Volodymyr Zelensky tweeted that Moscow “is rapidly getting used to a full-fledged war,’’ without confirming or denying Kyiv’s involvement in the attack.
Russian officials have claimed that the repeated attacks on the capital region reflect failures in Ukraine’s counteroffensive to recapture Russian-occupied territory. Zelensky said over the weekend that “the war is gradually coming back to Russian territory” but stopped short of taking responsibility for the attacks.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said it shot down two Ukrainian drones outside Moscow and jammed another, sending it crashing into a skyscraper and damaging the building’s facade. The attack happened in a business district of high-rise office buildings known as Moscow City, west of the Kremlin.
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said the drone crashed into the same building that was damaged in a similar attack early Sunday. IQ-Quarter, about four miles from the Kremlin, houses a number of government agencies, including the headquarters of the Ministry of Economic Development, the Ministry of Digital Development and Communications, and the Ministry of Industry and Trade.
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The mayor said the attack on Tuesday didn’t result in any casualties.
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It wasn’t clear why the same building was hit twice. In both incidents, the Russian military said the drones that hit the skyscraper were jammed before crashing — which elicited questions from even the staunchest supporters of the Kremlin.
Margarita Simonyan, chief editor of the state-funded TV channel RT, said in a social media post that “a drone hitting the same tower for the second time in a row, where three federal ministries are located, at least requires explaining the comments that the electronic warfare downed them all.”
Asked about how protected the Russian capital is, given that supposedly jammed drones hit the same building, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov redirected the question to the Defense Ministry, saying only that “the threat exists and measures are being taken.”
Sobyanin said the drone that struck the building Tuesday hit the 21st floor, one of the floors housing the Economic Development Ministry. Photos from the site of the crash showed several panels of glass missing, exposing the charred insides of the building, and about a dozen more were damaged. According to the mayor, about 1,600 square feet of the building’s glass facade was damaged.
Russian news agency Interfax cited Darya Levchenko, an advisor to the economic development minister, as saying that the ministry’s staff was working from home on Tuesday, while damage to the office was being assessed.
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The Russian military also said that Ukrainian forces tried to attack two of its warships in the Black Sea overnight, using maritime drones. Three drones targeted two patrol vessels, Sergei Kotov and Vasily Bykov, 210 miles southwest of the Russian-controlled city of Sevastopol on the Crimean peninsula, the Defense Ministry reported. All three drones were destroyed, the report said.
The attacks on Moscow and Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed from Ukraine in 2014, follow a deadly Russian missile strike on Kryvyi Rih, a city in central Ukraine and Zelensky’s hometown. Monday’s strike killed seven people and wounded dozens more in a residential building.
Russia’s land and sea border with Ukraine spans more than 1,400 miles, meaning that much of the line separating the two countries is not covered by defense radar, which creates an opening for drones.
“Depending on where they are launched from, if there is a way to get through the initial line of defenses, then there will probably be a very poor ability to track them in real time,” said professor Justin Bronk, an expert in military air power and technology at the Royal United Services Institute, a defense think tank in London.
The most advanced defense systems around Moscow “are typically optimized for ballistic missile defense and are looking at targets and objects which are coming in at extremely high speeds and from very high angles,” Bronk said.
Unlike ballistic missiles, drones can fly low and slow. That presents a challenge for radar systems, which scan higher altitudes and filter out slow-moving objects such as birds.
In other developments Tuesday, Russian forces attacked Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, with Iranian-made Shahed drones, according to Kharkiv Gov. Oleh Sinegubov. One drone struck a three-story building at an educational institution in the Saltivka district, partially destroying the top two floors of the building, as well as the roof. No one was inside the building at the time of the attack.
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Three more drone strikes hit the area of a sports complex in the Shevchenkivskyi district of Kharkiv. A two-story building in the complex was partially damaged, and a 63-year-old security guard was wounded, Sinegubov said.
Russian forces shelled the city of Kherson on Tuesday morning and hit a medical facility, according to regional Gov. Roman Mrochko, killing a doctor and wounding one nurse.
“A young talented doctor was killed, who was on his first day of work after internship. It was his first working day, which ended without even starting,” Tetiana Karchevych, Kherson region health department head, said at the site of the attack.
Ukraine’s presidential office reported Tuesday morning that at least 12 civilians had been killed in the country over the previous 24 hours, and 104 people injured.
Hanna Arhirova in Kyiv, Ukraine, and Yuras Karmanau in Berlin, contributed to this report.