At least four people killed in Russia as Ukraine launches retaliatory strikes

At least four people have been killed in a large-scale retaliatory strike by Ukraine on Russia’s regions, including Moscow, Russian authorities have said.

The wave of almost 600 Ukrainian drones struck overnight across 14 Russian regions, as well as the Crimean peninsula and the Black and Azov seas, the Russian defence ministry said on Sunday, with the region around the capital among the worst-hit.

Three people were killed in the Moscow region and one in the Belgorod region, authorities said, as Russian air defences shot down 556 drones overnight and neutralised another 30 after dawn.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said last week that more drone strikes would be launched in retaliation for a deadly three-day Russian attack across Ukraine that killed more than 20 people and injured about 50 others.

Moscow’s regional governor, Andrei Vorobyov, said a woman had been killed when a home was hit in Khimki, north of the capital, in what he described as a “massive” strike on the region, which surrounds but does not include the capital.

Vorobyov said rescuers were still searching the debris for another person. Two men had also been killed in the village of Pogorelki, 10km (6 miles) north of Moscow, after drone debris fell on a construction site, he added, and several residential high-rises and “infrastructure facilities” were damaged.

Residents clear broken windows in a damaged apartment building in the Moscow region. Photograph: Reuters

“Since 3am this morning, air defence forces have been repelling a large-scale UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] attack on the capital region,” Vorobyov said, adding that four people had also been wounded.

In the capital itself, air defence systems intercepted more than 80 drones overnight, the city’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, posted on social media. Twelve people were wounded and “minor damage” was recorded where the debris fell, he said.

One of the strikes wounded construction workers and damaged three houses at a site near Moscow’s oil and gas refinery, Sobyanin said, adding that refinery production had not been disrupted and the “technology” of the refinery had not been affected.