A man photographs the aftermath of a Ukrainian drone strike on his mobile phone on Tuesday in an apartment building in Ramenskoye near Moscow’s Zhukovsky International Airport. The attack forced the airport to impose flight restrictions along with the capital’s three other main airports — Sheremetyevo, Domodedovo and Vnukovo. Photo by Maxim Shipenkov/EPA-EFE
March 11 (UPI) — Russian authorities said at least two people in Moscow were killed and 18 injured, including three children, after Ukraine attacked western Russia with hundreds of drones hours before high-level talks between U.S. and Ukrainian officials on ending the war were due to get underway in Saudi Arabia.
A 38-year-old security guard was killed after a drone struck the parking lot of an agribusiness in Domodedovksy 30 miles south of downtown Moscow and a 50-year-old-man died from his injuries in a hospital in nearby Vidnoye, just outside the Moscow city limits, according to a social media post by Moscow Region Governor Andrey Vorobyov.
Calling it the “largest-ever” drone attack on the Russian capital, damaging residential and other buildings and torching vehicles, Vorobyov claimed air defenses had repelled the airborne assault, downing 91 drones targeting more than a dozen communities across the Moscow region.
He said most of the damage was caused by debris from destroyed drones.
“The drone attack affected 20 people in the Moscow Region, including three kids. Two adults were killed, unfortunately,” Russian Assistant Health Minister Alexey Kuznetsov told the state-run TASS news agency.
Kuznetsov said six others remained hospitalized, including a child, with one person a critical condition and a second listed as “serious.”
“The other injured people, including a child, are in fair condition. Twelve people, among them a child, are receiving outpatient care,” he added.
Industrial facilities in Leninksy, just south of Moscow, were also hit, including warehouses of the Moscow Coke and Gas Plant and Santechkomplect, a large building and plumbing supplies company.
One man was reported injured in a drone strike in the Lipetsk region, 250 miles north of Kharkiv, Ukraine, in the attacks that saw Ukrainian forces launch 337 UAVs against seven other Russian regions, including Kursk, part of which is occupied by Ukrainian troops, Bryansk, Ryazan, Kaluga, Oryol, Voronezh and Nizhny Novgorod.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova condemned the attack saying it should be seen as a warning of the danger to all posed by a barbarous regime created and nurtured by the West.
“This is a signal to the international community, to the collective West, which is collective only on its surface and utterly fragmented in practice, that now it will deal with the unleashed madness of the monster they raised, fed, equipped, provided with weapons without control and showered with money,” she told reporters.
Russia launched its own attacks in the other direction overnight using an Iskander-M ballistic missile and more than 70 drones, injuring two people in Kharkiv and Sumy regions and igniting major blazes in the southwestern port city of Odessa after drones struck fuel tanks, a house and a warehouse full of children’s toys.
The exchanges came as U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was due to sit down for talks Tuesday with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky‘s head of office, Andriy Yermak, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to hammer out a framework for a peace deal and cease-fire they hope will lead to an end to the three-year-long Ukraine-Russia war.