Ukraine sends 390 drones at Moscow in one night, closing three airports

Moscow's mayor claims 390 drones came at the capital region in ten hours; the reported hits cluster on factories, warehouses and power infrastructure.

Ukrainian drones targeted Moscow and its surrounding region for roughly ten hours overnight into Tuesday, Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin claimed, putting the total at more than 390 airframes between 8:30 p.m. Monday and 6:30 a.m., with 81 shot down on approach to the city, Kyiv Post reported. Aviation authority Rosaviatsia halted arrivals and departures at Vnukovo, Domodedovo and Zhukovsky during the attack; Domodedovo said its restrictions lifted shortly after 6 a.m. Moscow time. Russia's Defense Ministry said it intercepted 356 Ukrainian drones across Russia and occupied Crimea over the same night. There was no immediate confirmation from Ukraine.

Drones struck the Hydrostalkonstruktsiya steel fabrication plant in Chekhov, about 50 kilometers south of Moscow, the monitoring channel Exilenova Plus reported, per The Kyiv Independent. Moscow region governor Andrei Vorobyov confirmed damage to an apartment building in Chekhov, where local authorities counted a damaged facade and two apartments, and a tire fire that OSINT project Astra geolocated to the Chekhov Regeneration plant, one of Russia's largest tire recyclers. In Koledino, a warehouse used by logistics firm 3PL burned next to a Wildberries distribution center, according to Astra; Wildberries said its own facility kept operating. Earlier in the night a strike on an electrical substation left much of Feodosia, in occupied Crimea, without power, the Crimean Wind channel wrote.

The raid follows Ukrainian strikes on Wildberries warehouses near St. Petersburg on July 24 and in Podolsk on July 20, on 14 energy facilities in occupied Crimea over three days, and on an export terminal in Russia's Rostov region plus an oil site in Udmurtia, 1,300 kilometers from the Ukrainian border, Zelenskyy said on Monday.

Ukraine is on track to build 6 to 7 million small first-person-view attack drones this year, about 500,000 a month, Defense Innovation Unit chief operating officer Travis Metz told Reuters on Monday. The Pentagon's $1.1 billion counterpart program will have ordered just under 200,000 in total by February, Metz said.

His unit runs its next drone test event, Gauntlet II, in August. The 19 competing firms, Ukrainian entrants among them, must build without Chinese motors or battery packs and localize production in the United States as a condition of future orders, The Guardian noted in its war briefing.