More than 600 Ukrainian drones target Moscow; Wildberries warehouse damaged
Some 620 Ukrainian drones headed toward the Moscow region starting on the evening of August 17, Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin said, adding that 180 of them were shot down.
Sobyanin later said another 17 drones bound for Moscow had been shot down but gave no details on the aftermath of the attack.
Moscow region Governor Andrei Vorobyov said more than 150 drones were shot down over the region overnight into the morning. In the Ramenskoye district, a drone came down on a private home and wounded a 10-year-old girl, who suffered a shrapnel injury to her hand. A woman was injured in the Bogorodsk district, and a 27-year-old man was hurt in Kolomna.
Vorobyov said the Pavlovo-Posad district bore the brunt of the attack. A private home burned down in the village of Kuznetsy, and the roof of an apartment building caught fire in Pavlovsky Posad. More than 5,000 people and 46 socially significant facilities in the district lost power, according to Mosoblenergo.
In Noginsk, a drone struck a Wildberries warehouse near Atlant Park. The governor said the resulting fire was contained and no one was injured. Wildberries’ press service stated that the company’s logistics complex sustained “minor damage” after “drone debris” struck the building’s wall, claiming that employees had been evacuated in advance and no goods were damaged.
In Kolomna, the attack sparked a fire at a retail pavilion near the Globus shopping center and damaged a civil registry office, a store, and the windows of an apartment building on Sovetskaya Square. Scaffolding caught fire at a residential complex under construction in Kotelniki, while a car and a transformer substation were damaged in Elektrostal. Private homes were also damaged in the Ramenskoye and Bogorodsk districts.
Nine drones were shot down over the Ryazan region overnight, and three people were injured, Ryazan Governor Pavel Malkov said. Two of them were hospitalized, and three private homes were damaged in the Ryazan district.
Russia’s Defense Ministry reported that 791 Ukrainian drones were shot down overnight over Russian regions, occupied Crimea, and the waters of the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea.
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What debris?
Russian propaganda often invokes “drone debris” to downplay the scale of an attack and highlight the effectiveness of air defenses; Ukraine has adopted the same tactic. Fragments of drones and missiles do sometimes fall to the ground, but wartime conditions make it impossible to quickly confirm or refute such claims. Treat any report of “drone debris” with caution.