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Russian officials have reported intercepting at least 12 drones on their way to Moscow over the last three weeks, suggesting that such attacks are now bringing the war to Russia’s capital city on a near-daily basis.
In the latest such attacks, two drones flying near Moscow were shot down overnight, Russian officials said on Wednesday.
The claims of the attacks and their interceptions could not be independently verified. But Ukrainian officials, long circumspect about whether their forces were involved in attacks on Russian soil, have acknowledged that some were orchestrated by Kyiv, making it increasingly clear that they will not allow the war to be limited to their own soil.
And not all of the drones appear to have intercepted. Last week, a building in central Moscow housing government ministries was twice struck by drones in 48 hours.
While the Russian authorities have largely tried to play down the risks of drone attacks, Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, spoke last week of “a clear threat,” adding that “measures are being taken” to build up defenses around the capital.
On Wednesday, Russia’s Ministry of Defense said in a post on the Telegram messaging app that air defenses had destroyed the two drones near Moscow without casualties or damage.
One had been flying over the Domodedovo area on the southern outskirts of the capital and the second was in the Minsk highway district to its west, Moscow’s mayor, Sergey S. Sobyanin, said in a Telegram post on Wednesday.
Another drone was shot down approaching the capital on Sunday, Mr. Sobyanin said, prompting Vnukovo airport, which serves Moscow, to temporarily suspend flights for “security reasons,” according to a Telegram post from the Russian state news agency Tass.
“Gradually, the war is returning to the territory of Russia — to its symbolic centers and military bases,” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said late last month. “And this is an inevitable, natural and absolutely fair process.”
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Mr. Zelensky, said on social media last week that “Moscow is rapidly getting used to a full-fledged war,”
Since the beginning of May, Russia’s Defense Ministry has reported at least 28 drone attacks on Russia soil. Though the assaults have caused nothing close to the devastation Moscow’s forces have inflicted in Ukraine, they have reached deep into Russian territory and have been aimed at symbolic and military targets, including the strike near the Kremlin.
The May attack on the Kremlin was said to have unnerved the Biden administration. There was a relative lull in attempted aerial attacks inside Russia until mid-July, and while subsequent drone assaults have been far less audacious, they have highlighted Ukraine’s expanded reach.
An analysis by The New York Times of attacks inside Russia using Ukrainian-made drones, as well as interviews with experts and officials, found that Ukraine is racing to scale up its homegrown drone fleet and is aiming to attack more frequently in Russia.
Some Russian military bloggers have suggested that the attacks are acts of desperation by Ukraine, aimed at making headlines while its slow and grueling counteroffensive grinds on. But some have also acknowledged that the assaults could have a psychological effect on the Russian public, who have hitherto largely escaped the day-to-day reality of the conflict.
Gaya Gupta contributed reporting.
— Enjoli Liston
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Though both Russia and Ukraine possess significant air defense capabilities, both countries have struggled to fend off attacks from small drones. For years, Washington has spent significant resources researching how to better defend against the threat, which the Pentagon also considers formidable.
“A small drone flying close to the earth and flying quickly is very difficult to pick up if you are carrying out counter-drone efforts — and that’s just as true for Moscow as it is for Washington,” said Seth G. Jones, senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “Frankly, they are pretty perplexing challenges for any state to defend against.”
The conflict between Russia and Ukraine has been notable for its usage of drones, particularly small drones that are not only being used on the battlefield for reconnaissance and targeting, but also larger drones carrying out the types of attacks seen recently in and around Moscow, including two drones that Russian officials shot down on Wednesday. Samuel Bendett, an adviser at Virginia-based security analytics firm, CNA, and an adjunct senior fellow at the Washington-based think tank Center for a New American Security, said the attacks in Moscow raised questions about gaps in the Russian air defense systems set up to protect the capital.
“Most air defenses around the world were developed to target aircraft, helicopters and incoming missile — large, easy to identify targets,” Mr. Bendett said. “Most of the air defenses were not developed to try to interdict small U.A.V.s,” he said, referring to unmanned aerial vehicles.
He said Russia has a number of systems that its officials have praised as successful in downing drones. But so long as drones are flying low enough and avoiding certain areas, they likely can get around the air defenses, he said.
“The attacks are certainly applying psychological pressure, especially the air attacks on Moscow,” Mr. Bendett said. But, he added, the question was how much of an effect the drones were having “if the Russian society is resigned to this war.”
He also said Ukraine had Bober and UJ-22 Airborne drones, which have significant ranges and could also be used to strike Russian targets that would have significant military and economic consequences.
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Poland will send an additional 2,000 troops to reinforce its border with Belarus, a deputy interior minister told Poland’s state news agency on Wednesday, amid heightened tensions in the area related to Russia’s war in Ukraine.
The minister, Maciej Wasik, said that the deployment was double what the country’s Border Guard had requested and that the reinforcements would arrive in two weeks, according to PAP, Poland’s state news agency. There was no immediate response from Belarus.
While Mr. Wasik did not specify to PAP what had prompted the decision, the deployment comes as concerns are mounting in Poland, a NATO member, over the presence of mercenaries from Russia’s Wagner private military company in neighboring Belarus, a staunch Russian ally.
The Wagner fighters were relocated to Belarus following their short-lived June mutiny in Russia, which ended after President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus brokered a deal allowing them to avoid prosecution by relocating to his country. Belarus borders Poland to the west, Russia to the east and Ukraine to the south.
Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, said last week that there were at least 4,000 Wagner fighters in Belarus. He warned against “provocations” and “sabotage actions” from Belarus by the relocated Wagner fighters, a caution that came days after two Belarusian helicopters breached Polish airspace, heightening jitters in the region.
In late July, the Belarusian Defense Ministry said its soldiers were being trained by Wagner fighters near the border with Poland, prompting Poland to begin moving military forces to bolster its side of the border.
In a speech to the Russian Defense Ministry on Wednesday, the agency’s top official, Sergei K. Shoigu, did not directly address Poland’s announcement of the new deployment, but said that existing threats to Russia’s security were “related to the militarization of Poland.”
New threats to Russia had “multiplied in the western and northwestern strategic directions,” Mr. Shoigu said, which he added was due in large part to the hefty military support NATO members in the region were offering to Ukraine. Finland, which shares a long border with Russia, joined NATO this spring.
Three other of Russia’s regional NATO neighbors — Latvia and Lithuania, which border Belarus, and Estonia — joined Poland in issuing a statement on Wednesday noting the third anniversary of Mr. Lukashenko’s claim of victory in a hotly contested and fraud-ridden presidential election. His fealty to the Kremlin grew shortly after, when he had to ask Mr. Putin for help suppressing widespread protests against his rule.
“Ignoring the will of the vast majority of the Belarusian people, the regime grants Moscow full political and logistical support” for its war, the statement from the four countries said. Belarus, it added, “has been made into a true hotbed of destabilization in the heart of Europe.”
Anushka Patil contributed reporting.
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Three people were killed and nine others were injured after a Russian missile struck a residential area of the city of Zaporizhzhia in southeastern Ukraine, Ukrainian officials said on Thursday.
The attack on Wednesday hit the city’s largest district, Shevchenkivskyi, which the city council’s website describes as being “mostly bedroom.” A church building and several local shops were destroyed, and the windows were blown out of several high-rise buildings, the head of the regional military administration, Yuri Malashko, said on the Telegram messaging app on Wednesday evening.
The Russian missile struck around 8 p.m., after a day of air-raid warnings across the country prompted by a Ukrainian Air Force warning that a MiG-31K jet had taken off from a Russian air base. The jets are capable of carrying hypersonic Kinzhal missiles, also known as Daggers, some of the most sophisticated conventional weapons in Russia’s arsenal.
“All of Ukraine is a missile hazard!” the air force warned, asking residents not to ignore the alarms.
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President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine shared images of the attack on Zaporizhzhia in an online post, adding that the rescue operation was underway and that Russia would “face its sentence.”
Earlier on Wednesday, Reuters reported that a senior adviser to Mr. Zelensky, Mykhailo Podolyak, denied Russian accusations that Kyiv tried to carry out a drone attack against the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear complex, which lies around a bend of the Dnipro River just south of the city.
In Nikopol, a city to the northwest across the river from the nuclear plant, an 18-year-old died after Russian shelling struck the city, according to state administrators. Farther to the southwest, in the city of Kherson, a 16-year-old girl died more than a week after she was injured in shelling attacks, the region’s governor said on Wednesday.
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The United States used the anniversary of Belarus’s disputed 2020 presidential election to impose new sanctions against the country on Wednesday, punishing state-owned enterprises and key government officials for involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war and the “fiercely undemocratic and repressive policies” of its longtime authoritarian leader, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko.
“In line with our partners and Allies, we will continue to ensure that the regime pays a price for its abysmal treatment of its own citizens and that our measures in response to Russia’s aggression cannot be circumvented through Belarus,” Brian E. Nelson, the Treasury Department’s under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said in a statement.
The Treasury Department issued sanctions against eight individuals and five entities, including the state-owned Belarusian airline, Belavia. The State Department is also imposing visa restrictions on 101 government officials for their role in suppressing or undermining democratic institutions in Belarus, according to a news release, including seven judges who issued “unjust and excessive politically motivated sentences” against Belarusians who voiced grievances against their government.
Mr. Lukashenko, a loyal ally of the Kremlin, has been in power since 1994 and claimed to have won 80 percent of the vote in the country’s 2020 election, which many Western governments consider fraudulent and which his opponents dismissed as blatantly rigged.
In June, he was responsible for brokering an agreement between President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner mercenary group, after Mr. Prigozhin’s brief uprising in June.
In announcing the State Department sanctions, Antony J. Blinken called for the “immediate and unconditional release” of 1,500 political prisoners, including Ales Bialiatski, a veteran human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate serving a 10-year prison sentence on charges that advocates have condemned as meant to silence him.
Wednesday’s round of sanctions was just the latest the United States has imposed against Belarus during more than half of Mr. Lukashenko’s nearly three-decade rule. In recent years, sanctions were imposed in 2020, after Mr. Lukashenko suppressed pro-democracy protests surrounding the disputed election; in 2021, after he forced a commercial airliner to land in the Belarusian capital, Minsk, to have a dissident blogger aboard arrested; and again in March, in response to what the Treasury Department characterized as Mr. Lukashenko’s “ongoing brutal crackdown against the pro-democracy movement and civil society” and his government’s “complicity in the Russian Federation’s ongoing unjustified war of choice against Ukraine.”
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Ukraine must be ready for an upsurge in Russian airstrikes this fall, the country’s air force spokesman said on Wednesday, warning that Moscow may seek to resume its campaign to destroy critical energy infrastructure targets as winter approaches.
Yuriy Ihnat, the air force spokesman, said Ukraine “should expect an escalation.” While he said the attacks may not be as intense as last winter’s because Russia’s stockpiles of missiles and drones have been depleted, Mr. Ihnat told Ukrainian television that Moscow was nonetheless building up its ammunition for the fall.
Russia’s campaign against Ukraine’s power grid last winter left millions of people without consistent access to power, water and heat. President Volodymyr Zelensky has also warned that Moscow would renew its energy attacks in the colder months and called for officials at every level of government to be prepared.
Mr. Inhat’s comments came after Ukraine’s nuclear power company said on Monday that all the plants under its control were expected to be repaired in time for the winter.
Ukraine is heavily reliant on nuclear power. Before the war, roughly half its energy needs were provided by 15 reactors at four plants. Russian forces captured the Zaporizhzhia power plant soon after the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion began last year, leaving Ukraine with nine reactors.
Repairs and maintenance to fortify the grid have been completed at five of the remaining reactors, and people were “working to their limits” on the other four, Petro Kotin, the head of Energoatom, the state nuclear power company, said on Monday after visiting the South Ukraine plant, near the city of Yuzhnoukrainsk. Over the weekend, workers finished repairing one of that plant’s three reactors two weeks ahead of schedule, Energoatom said.
The project is the Ukrainian energy sector’s largest repair campaign since the country gained independence in 1991, as the Soviet Union was crumbling, said the energy minister, Herman Galushchenko.
Ukrainian officials have said they want to add 1.7 gigawatts of capacity, or enough to power more than a million homes, ahead of winter, and more by the end of the year. The Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia plant, which is Europe’s largest, has a capacity of around six gigawatts.
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A powerful explosion ripped through a warehouse on the grounds of a factory that has made optical gear for the Russian military outside Moscow on Wednesday, officials said, killing one person, injuring dozens and sending up an enormous plume of smoke visible for miles.
Local officials said the blast tore apart a warehouse storing “pyrotechnics” located at the Zagorsk Optical-Mechanical Plant in the town of Sergiyev Posad, less than 50 miles from Moscow. Along with the person killed, at least 50 people were injured, some seriously, according to information posted by local authorities on the social messaging app Telegram. Tass, the Russian state news agency, later reported that a local official had increased the tally of those injured to 60, with an additional eight people missing.
A powerful explosion at an optical plant in the town of Sergiyev Posad — around 70 kilometers northeast of Moscow — has injured at least 11 people.
The cause of the explosion is still unknown. pic.twitter.com/NnSe7DOqrJ
— The Moscow Times (@MoscowTimes) August 9, 2023
Security camera footage captured the moment of the explosion at the warehouse, with the blast sending a mushroom cloud hundreds of feet into the sky. The explosion blew out windows in schools, in a sports complex and in about 20 nearby apartment buildings, according to the local government administration.
Local authorities are investigating what caused the blast.
The Zagorsk facility is one of the oldest optical-mechanical plants in Russia. The company is a leading developer of optical devices for Russian security services, according to the Russian state news agency Tass.
It produces night vision devices and binoculars for the Russian military as part of the country’s defense conglomerate Rostec, according to the Moscow Times newspaper.
Andrey Vorobyev, the governor of the Moscow region, said in a video posted on Telegram by state news media that the plant had not manufactured optical devices “for a long time.”
Mr. Vorobyev said that Piro-Ross, a private company that produces pyrotechnics, had been renting the warehouse space at the plant. Public records show that Piro-Ross declared bankruptcy last year.
Russia’s Federal Investigative Committee said in a statement on Telegram that it was looking into the possible “violation of industrial safety requirements.”
“We are looking into the causes of the blast,” Dmitry Akulov, the head of the district, wrote on Telegram. The authorities ordered a “total evacuation” of all plant buildings and workshops, and the entire town of Sergiyev Posad has entered a state of emergency, local officials said.
Five more people could be buried under the rubble, Mr. Vorobyev said.
German authorities accused a man employed by the federal army supply office on suspicion of spying for Russia on Wednesday, arresting him at his home in the southern city of Koblenz.
The man, identified only as Thomas H. in keeping with strict German privacy rules, worked for the German federal office handling army equipment, information technology and in-service support when he approached both the Russian Consulate in Cologne and the Russian Embassy in Berlin with an offer of collaboration in May, according to the federal prosecutor, who ordered the arrest.
It is not immediately clear what access he had at the federal office, or whether he was a soldier or a civilian.
The federal prosecutor did not confirm whether Russian staff at the diplomatic houses accepted his offer, but said that Thomas H. had transmitted some sensitive information from his post to the Russians when making his approaches, presumably to demonstrate his usefulness.
Germany has renewed its efforts to try to curb Russian intelligence operations since Russia launched its war in Ukraine.
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They have NATO equipment and Western training. Some have English-speaking commanders, unusual in the Ukrainian military, and even an American-accented, evangelical chaplain.
“I am never tired — I’m in the Ukrainian marines,” joked Oleksandr, 28, a battalion commander of the 37th Marine Brigade. Sitting down in the shade outside a cottage near the front line, he was determinedly positive. “I think it’s going well.”
Over the past several months, nine Ukrainian brigades, 36,000 troops in all, have received four to six weeks of training in combined arms combat, a synchronized way of fighting that some thought would enable them to spearhead another rout of the Russian military, as in Kharkiv last year.
But some brigades suffered heavy losses in the initial stages of this summer’s counteroffensive, struggling to advance against the formidable Russian defenses. At least one new brigade was so badly debilitated from casualties that it was withdrawn from the battlefield to rebuild.
Most of the fighting has been hidden from the view of the news media since the start of operations in early June. But reporters from The New York Times were permitted to visit several marine brigades — two of them newly formed brigades — that are operating on one part of the southern front to hear from the troops themselves about their role in the counteroffensive.
— Carlotta Gall, Oleksandr Chubko and Diego Ibarra Sanchez
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One military official was accused of facilitating a large-scale draft dodging scheme, charging eligible Ukrainian men $10,000 apiece for documents allowing them to leave the country. Another was suspected of forcing soldiers to build him a mansion. Other officials were accused of beating their soldiers.
Ukraine’s State Bureau of Investigation said on Tuesday that those cases were among the 112 it had opened against military enlistment officers since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, in an apparent push to crack down on abuses of power for personal profit.
Before the war, Ukraine had a long history of corruption. Concern about the issue has shadowed wartime aid for the country, increasing pressure on Ukraine to show that it is removing bad actors from official positions.
Fifteen cases involving the abuse of military power have already been filed in court, the bureau said, and cases against 10 military enlistment officers have started in the past week alone.
After Russia’s full-scale invasion, the Ukrainian government barred all men aged 18 to 60 from leaving the country, with few exceptions. In June, the spokesman for Ukraine’s State Border Guard said up to 20 men were being detained every day for attempting to cross the border illegally.
On Saturday, the bureau detained the head of the Kyiv District Territorial Center for Recruitment and Social Support, accusing that official of being part of a large-scale scheme to allow draft-age Ukrainians to leave the country. The bureau accused the official, without mentioning him by name, of charging draft-age Ukrainians $10,000 for fictitious documents saying that they were unfit to serve.
Last Thursday, the bureau detained the head of one of Kyiv’s military administration departments, accusing him of fabricating documents for three Ukrainian men of draft age that said they were unfit to serve the military. The documents, the bureau said, cost $30,000, and were meant to help the men leave the country.
On Saturday, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine hinted in his nightly address that a crackdown on anticorruption was underway.
“Next week our work on cleaning public institutions from those who tried to drag from the past all those old habits, old schemes that weakened Ukraine for a very long time, for decades, will continue,” he said.
“No matter, who this person is — whether he is a ‘military commissar,’ whether he is a deputy, or whether he is an official — everyone must work only for the sake of the state,” he added.
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Ukraine’s counteroffensive may be moving at a slower pace than Western leaders would like, but a new analysis by a British think-tank suggests that’s because those same Western leaders moved too slowly to send Ukraine the tanks, armored vehicles and ammunition it needed.
The analysis, published Tuesday by the Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies, regarded as one of the world’s leading defense and security think tanks, concluded that Western officials hesitated too long over whether to send key weapons. It says that decisions were delayed even though there was widespread understanding more than a year ago of what would be required for Ukraine to push back Russian forces and reclaim territory in the east and south.
The findings echoed the warnings President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said he gave allies ahead of the counteroffensive that began in early June.
Jack Watling, a senior expert on land warfare who wrote the analysis, said the war in Ukraine has “highlighted significant deficiencies” in how Western governments respond to rising threats.
“The most glaring deficiency is the inability of Ukraine’s partners to appreciate the lead times between decisions and their desired effects,” Mr. Watling wrote. “This deficiency is being demonstrated at great cost in Ukraine’s current offensive.”
For example, he said, officials in Western capitals were becoming aware in July 2022 of what Ukraine would need for an offensive, and were told directly starting last September of specific and necessary training, equipment and support requirements. Even so, Mr. Watling noted, decisions to fulfill the requests were not made until mid-January.
That is when Britain, France, Germany and the United States agreed to send Western tanks and other armored fighting vehicles to Ukraine, essentially allowing other NATO countries to follow suit. The moves also included training for Ukrainian forces on the sophisticated weapons systems. While British-made Challenger 2 tanks and Leopard tanks manufactured in Germany are already being deployed to the ongoing counteroffensive, the American-made Abrams tanks are not expected to reach Ukraine until early fall.
“Had the decision to equip and train Ukrainian forces been taken and implemented when the requirements were identified in the autumn, Ukraine would have had a much easier task in reclaiming its territory,” Mr. Watling said.
He also noted a “massive consumption” of ammunition by Ukraine, which NATO members realized as early as June 2022 was draining their own stockpiles, putting military readiness at risk. The United States and European governments are grappling with how to boost ammunition production, a process that can take years as domestic weapons industries struggle to build back capacity to Cold War levels, although manufacturers are racing to meet demand.
To be sure, Western governments have provided tens of billions of dollars in weapons to Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, and last month, Mr. Zelensky expressed gratitude for the military assistance that has continued despite the risk of waning Western political support. The United States has been the biggest benefactor of Ukraine’s military by far, but presidential elections next year could determine whether the aid will remain at current levels.
That is one reason Western leaders have pressed Ukraine to push aggressively during the counteroffensive and win enough decisive gains to force Russia into peace negotiations. But the fight has unfolded slowly, with Ukraine’s forces tripped up by minefields and outgunned by Russian forces.
Mr. Watling said the sluggish Western efforts to prepare Ukraine for the fight showed that “the institutional memory of how to cohere the operational level of war has atrophied.”
“This malady is correctable,” he said, “but only if we can acknowledge that there is a problem to be addressed.”
