The mayor of Moscow, Sergey Sobyanin, has assured that Ukrainian forces have carried out the "largest drone attack" against the Russian capital, with the aim, as he has denounced, of "disrupting" the electoral day this Sunday, in which citizens are called to elect the State Duma again, the Lower House of Parliament.
"This unprecedented attack was clearly planned to disrupt the elections. The enemy failed," Sobyanin has stated, who has detailed that "more than 1600 drones have been intercepted on all fronts."
The Moscow mayor has indicated that 450 unmanned aerial vehicles were targeting the Russian capital. Some of them have reached an oil refinery, although, as he has emphasized, no casualties have been reported.
According to his figures, air defenses have managed to shoot down at least 186 drones since the first minutes of midnight on Sunday. He has also noted that emergency teams and firefighters remain deployed at various points in the city to intervene in areas affected by the fall of debris from intercepted devices.
The Ministry of Defense has raised the number of neutralized drones to about 1,100 and has emphasized that this is the largest attack launched by the Ukrainian Army so far this year, after the one recorded in mid-August, when Russian defenses destroyed more than 790 unmanned aerial vehicles.
This entire episode takes place amid the celebration of parliamentary elections, which have been taking place since last Friday and are the first since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. As a novelty, polling stations have been opened in Ukrainian territories militarily controlled by Russia.
The Central Electoral Commission of Russia has reported that, by the morning of this Sunday, more than 45% of voters had already cast their ballots. A new victory for the ruling party United Russia, which currently holds 315 of the 450 seats in the chamber, is practically considered certain.