Russia-Ukraine war live: Drones shot down after Putin’s largest aerial assault on Kyiv

Below are some more details about the Ukrainian drone strikes on Russia mainland overnight.

Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin said there had been an “attempted mass drone attack”. He said multiple regions on the outskirts of the Russian capital had been affected, mainly to the southwest of Moscow.

The Russian Ministry of Defence later claimed this morning that they had “destroyed four Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles over the territory of the Bryansk, Smolensk and Tula regions”.

Smolensk is by the Belarusian border north of Ukraine. Bryansk is 150 miles south, towards Ukraine. Tula is 111 miles directly south of Moscow.

The governor of the Moscow Region, Andrey Vorobyov, said the Podolsk district on the southern outskirts of Moscow and the Ramensky region to the southeast were also targeted. He claimed they were five drones downed.

He said: “In 3 cases there was damage to buildings on the ground; fortunately, there were no deaths or injuries.”

Multiple areas to the southwest of Moscow, including the Naro-Fominsk and Odintsovo urban districts, were affected, according to Mr Sobyanin.

The Ukrainian military destroyed eight of nine attack drones launched overnight by Russia, the air force said on Sunday.

There were no immediate reports of damage or about where the remaining drone had struck.

The attack, which the air force said was launched from the southeast, came a day after what Ukrainian officials said had been Russia’s largest drone attack of the war.

Ukraine has warned in recent weeks that Russia will target critical infrastructure in a winter aerial campaign, as it did last year.

Footage has shown the moment Ukrainian drones struck across western Russia, including in the capital of Moscow.

Drones hit the Kaluga and Tula region around the capital as well as nearby Bryansk.

It comes 24 hours after Russia launched its largest drone assault on the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv in months, firing 75 Iranian-made kamikaze UAVs at the city.

The damage of those attacks was kept to a minimum – 74 out of 75 Shahed drones were shot down – but at least five people were nonetheless hospitalised.

Ukraine launched one of the biggest drone attacks on the Moscow-annexed Crimean Peninsula since the full-scale war that started with Russia’s invasion 21 months ago, Russian officials said Friday.

At the same time, Ukrainian officials reported that the Kremlin’s forces escalated their weekslong and costly attempt to storm Avdiivka, a strategically important city in eastern Ukraine.

Ukrainian drones targeted four Russian regions, the country’s defence ministry said on Sunday.

It comes after Ukraine capital Kyiv faced Vladimir Putin’s biggest drone attack in the early hours of Saturday.

The drones targeted four regions: Moscow, Tula, Kaluga and Bryansk. At least 20 drones were intercepted in the Russian capital, said Moscow’s officials.

One person was left injured in Tula after an intercepted drone hit an apartment building, said the region’s governor Alexei Dyumin.

Flights were delayed or cancelled at Moscow’s main airports due to the attacks, reported the Kommersant newspaper.

One person was injured in Tula when an intercepted drone hit an apartment building, the region’s governor Alexei Dyumin said.

The shelves at Moscow supermarkets are full of fruit and vegetables, cheese and meat. But many of the shoppers look at the selection with dismay as inflation makes their wallets feel empty.

Russia’s Central Bank has raised its key lending rate four times this year to try to get inflation under control and stabilize the ruble’s exchange rate as the economy weathers the effects of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine and the Western sanctions imposed as a consequence.

One of the men, Denis Gorin, was recruited into a private military company after signing a contract with the Russian ministry of defence but is known to have been convicted thrice for murdering at least four people between 2003 and 2022.

He was also convicted of eating the remains of his victims along with his brother, reported Sibir Realii, a news outlet aligned with Radio Free Europe.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has announced a plan to endorse a national strategy for the development of artificial intelligence, claiming it’s essential to prevent a western ‘monopoly’.

Speaking at an AI conference in Moscow on Friday, Putin noted that “it’s imperative to use Russian solutions in the field of creating reliable and transparent artificial intelligence systems that are also safe for humans.”

“Monopolistic dominance of such foreign technology in Russia is unacceptable, dangerous and inadmissible,” Putin said.

He noted that “many modern systems, trained on western data are intended for the western market” and “reflect that part of western ethics, norms of behavior, public policy to which we object.”

During his more than two decades in power, Putin has overseen a multi-pronged crackdown on the opposition and civil society groups, and promoted “traditional values” to counter purported western influence — policies that have become even more oppressive after he sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022.

A Ukrainian soldier posthumously awarded a medal after a widely shared video showed him declaring “Glory to Ukraine“ before apparently being shot dead, has been commemorated with a statue in his hometown.

The video shared in March showed a man the military later named as Oleksandr Matsievskiy, a sniper with a unit from the region of Chernihiv, saying “Slava Ukraini,” a phrase more than a century old that has become a popular expression of resistance to Russia’s February 2022 invasion.

Standing smoking a cigarette in a wooded area, carrying no visible weaponry, Matsievskiy is then seen slumping to the ground, apparently struck repeatedly by unseen shooters.

Kyiv blamed “brutal and brazen” Russians for his death, as did his mother Paraska Demchuk, 68.

“He would have taken all of them with him if he had a grenade,” she said, as she proudly showed the medal President Volodymyr Zelenskiy bestowed on her son representing the “Hero of Ukraine“ honour.

“He would say to me, ‘Mum, I will never let them capture me’,” she said through tears. “He wouldn’t just bandy words about. It was on the inside, it was like a core inside him,” she said.

Kyiv has opened a criminal investigation into the death of Matsievskiy, who was quickly talked of as a hero on social media, where many supporters posted the words “Heroyam Slava,” or “Glory to the Heroes,” the traditional response to Slava Ukraini.