Moscow hit by largest drone attack yet, mayor says
Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said more than 1,600 drones were shot down, 450 of them on the approach to Moscow, as Russia’s defence ministry reported destroying nearly 2,000 drones and missiles nationwide.
Moscow has been hit by its largest drone attack yet, Sergei Sobyanin, the mayor of the Russian capital, has said.
Sobyanin gave a series of updates through the night, saying the attack was continuing and that a facility at the Moscow oil refinery had been damaged.
A drone then hit a building in the Orekhovy Boulevard area, Sobyanin said, before a final update confirmed the attack had been repelled.
More than 1,600 drones had been shot down across all lines of defence since the previous day, Sobyanin said, 450 of them on the approach to Moscow.
Several drones reached the site of the oil refinery and one struck a residential building, but there were no deaths, Sobyanin said.
Russia’s Defence Ministry said Ukraine had attempted a massed attack using drones and Flamingo cruise missiles on 19 and 20 September, with 1,951 attack drones and eight long-range cruise missiles destroyed over Russian regions in that period.
One further cruise missile crashed in an unpopulated area after veering off course, the ministry said.
The ministry said the assault was an attempt to disrupt voting in Russia’s parliamentary election, and that the attempt to strike Moscow had failed.
Ukraine’s General Staff confirmed carrying out the strike, saying it had hit the Gazpromneft oil refinery in Moscow’s Kapotnya district, causing a large fire and damaging the primary crude-distillation unit, known as AVT-6, along with a complex oil-refining unit and an isomerisation unit.
The General Staff said it had also struck a Buk-M3 air defence system and a Nebo-U radar station, describing the strikes as an exercise of Ukraine’s right to self-defence under Article 51 of the UN Charter.
Russia’s Defence Ministry said its forces would continue and step up strikes on military targets in Kyiv in response to the attacks on Russian civilian infrastructure.
Correction, 20 September 2026: An earlier version of the summary said more than 1,600 drones were shot down over Moscow. The mayor said more than 1,600 were shot down across all lines of defence, 450 of them on the approach to Moscow.
