Moscow Drone Attack: Russia Says 1,214 Drones Shot Down

Russia’s Ministry of Defence has claimed that its air defence forces intercepted and destroyed 1,214 Ukrainian fixed-wing drones over Russian territory during the night of October 28 to 29, surpassing the 1,110 it reported downing on September 20. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin stated that 613 of the drones had been flying towards the Moscow region, with most neutralised on the distant approaches and 231 destroyed as they neared the capital itself. The ministry reported only interceptions, as is its practice, leaving undisclosed how many drones were launched in all and how many reached their targets. With more than half of the claimed total aimed at the capital region, the figures point to a Ukrainian long-range strike campaign increasingly built around massed waves directed at Moscow itself.

Air defence units around the capital began engaging the first wave before 10:30 pm local time on October 28, according to Sobyanin, who reported several successive waves through the night, some of them dozens of drones strong, and stated that emergency services were working at the sites where debris fell. Russia’s aviation authority Rosaviatsia restricted arrivals and departures at Vnukovo, Domodedovo and Zhukovsky, three of the four main airports serving Moscow, and no casualties or damage were reported in the capital region. Far to the east, authorities in Sterlitamak in Bashkortostan, roughly 1,200 kilometres from the Ukrainian border, said eight drones were intercepted over the city, with Mayor Emil Shaimardanov stating that falling debris had caused minor damage at an industrial site. Regional officials in Belgorod, on the border with Ukraine, said one person was killed and seven injured during the night.

The attack was the third this month to send more than 600 drones towards the capital, following Sobyanin’s reports of 650 drones launched against the Moscow region on October 6 and more than 600 on October 22. It also came as Moscow hosted the third Russia-Africa Summit, at which the state arms exporter Rosoboronexport had planned to unveil a multilayered anti-drone dome built around Pantsir systems and pitched to African buyers. Ukrainian officials had not publicly commented on the Russian figures by Thursday morning, with Ukraine’s forces having struck targets deep inside Russia regularly throughout the year as drone warfare has spread as far as the Black Sea shipping lanes.

The ministry did not say which systems engaged the drones, although the inner layer of Moscow’s defences is widely reported to rely heavily on the Pantsir-S1, a short-range system that pairs 12 57E6 missiles with a range of around 20 kilometres with two twin-barrel 30 millimetre 2A38M cannons. Spending full-size missiles on cheap fixed-wing drones is a problem the newer Pantsir-SMD-E was designed to address, carrying up to 48 TKB-1055 miniature interceptors effective out to 7,000 metres, although Rosoboronexport has published no test results for the dome package it was due to present at the summit.