Ukraine sent one of the largest drone waves of the war toward Moscow overnight into Tuesday, October 6, Russian officials say, and the attack appears to have set fire to the biggest fuel depot in the Moscow region. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said more than 650 drones began flying toward the capital and the surrounding region on the evening of October 5. Russian state media called it the largest attack on the region in two years, the Kyiv Independent reports.
Russian authorities say their defenses stopped most of the drones. Sobyanin said air defenses downed a large share of them “at distant approaches” and destroyed 105 as they neared Moscow, then later reported another 29 shot down, according to Meduza. Moscow Oblast Governor Andrei Vorobyov put the number destroyed over the wider region at 185. The officials’ figures do not add up to 650, and none of the sources this desk read explained the gap or said how many drones reached their targets.
The raid still cost lives on the ground. Vorobyov said the attacks killed two people and injured nine, Reuters reports via the Straits Times: a 71-year-old man whom rescuers pulled from under the rubble of a house, and a 20-year-old man found in a nearby village. Earlier in the night the governor had reported one death and six injuries. Meduza, citing Vorobyov, says the strikes damaged 47 private homes across seven municipalities, including Istra and the Domodedovo district, where one house caught fire and another in Barybino lay destroyed.
Other damage reached commercial and power sites. A warehouse run by the Russian e-commerce company Wildberries caught fire, Reuters reports, citing local authorities quoted by the state news agency TASS. The head of Domodedovo, a city south of Moscow that hosts the country’s third-largest airport, said crews worked to restore electricity to villages that drones had hit.
The most consequential target may sit about 40 kilometers (25 miles) from central Moscow. Eyewitness footage from the village of Konstantinovo appears to show flames rising from the Volodarskaya linear production and dispatch station, a fuel hub some 450 kilometers (280 miles) from the Ukrainian border, the Kyiv Independent reports. Ukrainian monitoring channels and Astra, an independent Russian outlet on Telegram, reported the fire, citing witness photos and videos, according to Meduza. Local authorities have not reported it, Meduza notes, and the Kyiv Independent says it could not immediately verify the reports.
If confirmed, the hit would land on a key link in Moscow’s fuel supply. Astra describes the station as the largest oil depot in the Moscow region, the Kyiv Post reports. Transnefteprodukt, part of the state pipeline company Transneft, runs it, and it can handle up to 3 million metric tons of petroleum products a year, including gasoline, aviation fuel, and diesel. Pipelines carry its fuel to Moscow’s three major airports: Vnukovo, Domodedovo, and Sheremetyevo.
The raid fits a campaign that Kyiv has stepped up for weeks. On October 2, Ukrainian forces struck the Samara linear production and dispatch station, which Russian media call the country’s largest oil hub, and Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said Ukraine attacked four refineries that same night, the Kyiv Post reports. Late Sunday, October 4, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry claimed that strikes on refineries in cities including Moscow, Yaroslavl, Perm, and Saratov had knocked out 51% of Russia’s oil refining capacity, the Associated Press reports. Nobody has independently verified that figure.
Defense Minister Yevhenii Khmara said analysts from Ukraine’s intelligence services, the General Staff, and his ministry produced the assessment. “Our deep strikes continue to bring the war to Russian territory,” he said, according to the AP. Russia has published no figures on damage to its oil industry. But Vladimir Putin, speaking at the Valdai Club forum on October 1, conceded that the strikes have cost Russia roughly 1% of its gross domestic product. “They started attacking oil refineries and openly declared the goal of damaging our economy. Did they achieve their goal? Partially,” he said, the AP and the Guardian report.
The International Energy Agency has tracked the toll, the AP reports. Some of Russia’s 32 refineries have taken as many as 15 hits since the start of the war, one refinery has absorbed a strike roughly every three days in recent months, and diesel output has fallen by about 30%. Drivers in Russia have waited up to 40 hours to fill up, and the Kremlin has banned diesel exports, a move that pushed world prices higher.
The strikes now ripple into American politics. On Monday, President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social that Ukraine’s attacks on Russian refineries, rather than disruption in the Strait of Hormuz, now drive up U.S. gasoline prices, the Kyiv Post and the Guardian report. He also blamed refinery closures in Democratic-led states, a month before the midterm elections. On September 13, Trump had urged Ukraine to stop hitting refineries, according to the AP.
Russia, meanwhile, keeps up its own air war on Ukrainian cities. Russian bombs struck a residential area of Kharkiv on Monday, killing six people and injuring nearly 60, officials said, the Guardian reports; an earlier AP count put the toll at three dead and 39 wounded. Drone debris fell on a residential part of Kyiv’s Pecherskyi district late Monday after air defenses shot a drone down, the Kyiv Independent reports. French President Emmanuel Macron said Moscow “has made the irresponsible choice to intensify its strikes on civilian infrastructure and targets,” according to the Guardian.
Both sides keep adding new tools. Ukraine says it has started using AI-guided robotic gun turrets in Kyiv to shoot down Russia’s jet-powered drones, including the Geran-5. “Artificial intelligence makes it possible to engage even jet-powered drones,” air force spokesperson Yurii Ihnat said on Ukrainian television, the AP and the Guardian report. Russia, for its part, says Ukrainian drones hit two facilities at the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant on Monday and killed a driver delivering food to staff, while insisting that nuclear safety faced no threat. Ukraine has not commented on that claim, the Guardian reports.
Several questions remain open as of about 1 a.m. PT Tuesday. The sources this desk read carried no Ukrainian military statement on the Moscow-region targets, no official Russian word on the Volodarskaya fire, and no overall drone tally from Russia’s Defense Ministry. Satellite imagery or a statement from Transneft would settle whether the region’s biggest depot burned, and fuel supplies at Moscow’s airports may show whether the strike bit.
