Russian President Vladimir Putin faced a new round of pressure this Tuesday (30), after Ukraine launched another attack on the Russian capital, continued to affect the country’s fuel supplies and advanced its campaign to isolate Crimea, a peninsula annexed by Moscow from Ukraine in 2014.
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin reported several waves of drones since Monday night, less than two weeks after Ukraine carried out the biggest drone attack on the Russian capital since the start of the war. In a message on Telegram, he said that Russian air defenses had shot down more than 60 drones approaching Moscow and that emergency services were working at the crash sites. He did not mention injuries.
The governor of the Moscow region said the attack killed a 6-month-old baby in a city about 100 kilometers south of the capital.
In total, including the drones shot down in Moscow and Crimea, there were 419, according to a statement from the Russian Ministry of Defense.
Ukrainian authorities did not immediately comment on the case.
With drones saturating the front lines, Russia has found it difficult to advance on the battlefield in eastern Ukraine, where the Kremlin seeks to seize the rest of the Donetsk region. After a difficult May, Russian forces have slowly advanced again and have intensified bombings against the remaining Ukrainian strongholds in the region.
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Ukraine, in turn, has subjected Russia to ever-increasing drone strikes, eroding Putin’s ability to keep Russian society isolated from the effects of war.
Russia has been carrying out large-scale attacks against Ukraine for some time, but advances in Ukrainian drone production and technology have now allowed Kiev to send larger swarms of drones in the opposite direction.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called this campaign of attacks “far-reaching sanctions” and said the aim is to pressure Putin into ending the war.
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Putin, however, has toughened his speech. In statements on Sunday, he stated that Ukrainian actions will not divert Russia from its objective of gaining territory in eastern Ukraine.
In an interview with a Russian state broadcaster, he adopted a defiant tone and said he will continue to seek the “final liberation of Donbas and Novorossiya”. The term Novorossiya was revived by the Kremlin in 2014 to support territorial claims over eastern and southern Ukraine.
He admitted that attacks on Russian infrastructure, which have caused fuel shortages, are “creating problems”.
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“We are seeing certain shortcomings at the moment, although they are not critical,” Putin said in the interview.
He added that while Ukrainian attacks are painful, Russian bombings of Ukraine cause more damage.
“Our retaliatory strikes deep into Ukrainian territory are much more powerful, more effective and, frankly, more destructive, with really serious consequences,” Putin said.
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The Ukrainian drone attack on June 18 left at least 17 people injured in the Moscow region. The offensive targeted a major oil refinery and forced the temporary closure of the city’s four airports. Afterwards, the Russian Defense Ministry said it had shot down almost 1,000 drones across the country during the raid.
Zelensky said the attack was a response to bombings targeting a religious complex in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. Russia claimed the site was hit by a Ukrainian interceptor missile that went off course.
Tuesday’s attack on Moscow came amid Ukraine’s campaign to target Russian refineries and fuel facilities, an offensive that has already led to gasoline shortages and queues at gas stations across the country.
After the attacks, Russia’s federal aviation agency briefly imposed emergency restrictions on the main airports serving Moscow, citing flight safety reasons — something that has already become recurrent in the Russian capital.
Rosaviatsiya reported on Telegram that three of Moscow’s four international airports had to temporarily suspend operations overnight.
The 6-month-old baby who died in Tuesday’s attack was in a house in Yegoryevsk, a city southeast of Moscow, that caught fire after a drone fell on the property, regional governor Andrei Vorobyov said in a statement. According to him, rescue teams removed residents from the house, but the child died on the way to the hospital.
“Civilians are suffering and children are dying — this is the result of the Kiev regime’s actions,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in a statement to journalists after the attack.
In Ukraine, Zelensky said in a speech on Monday night, before the attack on Moscow, that drone offensives were “bringing the reality of war back to Russia”.
The Ukrainian president mentioned the queues of cars at gas stations, while attacks on Russian refineries, pumping stations and export ports are eroding the oil industry.
“We are ensuring the results Ukraine needs so that the aggressor state cannot keep the war ‘somewhere far away,’” Zelensky said.
The United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine reported on Monday that Russian forces killed 1,272 civilians and injured 6,871 others in areas controlled by the Ukrainian government in the six-month period ending May 31.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
