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Russia Says Downed Ukrainian Drone Hit Moscow Building

By VOA News August 23, 2023

Russian authorities said Wednesday a Ukrainian drone hit a building in central Moscow after being downed by Russian air defenses.

Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin said the building was under construction and that there were no reported casualties.

Russia's defense ministry said it brought down the drone with electronic jamming, and that air defenses also shot down two other drones in the Mozhaisk and Khimki parts of the Moscow region.

Moscow airports saw their operations briefly disrupted due to the Ukrainian attack, the latest in a string of drone assaults targeting the Russian capital.

Ukrainian authorities said late Tuesday that Russian artillery killed three people near the city of Lyman in eastern Ukraine.

Two villages near Lyman were hit, leaving two women and a man, ages 63 to 88, dead. The three were sitting together on a bench when the shelling hit.

Separately four people were injured in an attack using two explosive drones in a village in northeastern Ukraine near the Russian border, military officials said.

Two Ukrainian news outlets reported Tuesday that Ukrainian saboteurs were responsible for attacks on Saturday and Monday that destroyed two Russian bombers and damaged two other aircraft at two airbases deep inside Russia.

The attacks took place on Saturday at the Soltsy air base in northwestern Russia, 700 kilometers north of the Ukrainian border, and on Monday at the Shaikovka air base about 300 kilometers northeast of the Ukrainian border. The Associated Press could not independently verify the claims on the ground.

However, the Russian Defense Ministry acknowledged that the attack on Soltsy damaged one aircraft, the AP reported. It didn't comment on the reported attack on Shaikovka, but Russian media did.

Satellite images from Planet Labs analyzed by the AP showed what appeared to be 10 Tupolev Tu-22M long-range bombers parked at the Soltsy air base on August 16. By Monday, two days after the attack, all of the bombers had left the air base. A large black spot was visible where one of the Tupolevs had been parked.

Photos purporting to be from the Soltsy air base and published by Russian and Ukrainian media showed a Russian Tu-22M bomber ablaze there after the attack.

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.