Moscow. The Russian capital was once again a “military objective” for Ukraine yesterday, although Kiev did not claim responsibility for this or the previous attacks of similar characteristics, already the fourth in Moscow since an unmanned aerial device fell on the dome of the Senate Palace in the Kremlin last May, when Russian radio-electronic defense systems, around 4 in the morning, diverted two drones from their route that everything indicates were targeting important installations of the local army.
The Russian Ministry of Defense reported early yesterday that it had prevented “an attempt by the Kiev regime to perpetrate a terrorist attack with two unmanned aerial devices against facilities in the territory of Moscow”, while the Foreign Ministry described it as an “act of international terrorism”, through a formal statement.
“We believe that the Ukrainian military-political leadership once again used terrorist methods to intimidate the civilian population,” the Foreign Ministry maintains, and warns that Russia “reserves the right to adopt drastic response measures.”
For Russian diplomacy, “behind this brazen action by Ukrainian neo-Nazis emerges the intention of the West (the United States and its allies) to aggravate the situation.”
A drone fell on the roof of a building of the Army University, on Komsomolskaya avenue, just 500 meters from the headquarters of the Ministry of Defense, where the Military Operation Coordination Center (in Ukraine) is located. In that area, within the campus, are the offices of the General Directorate of Cyber Warfare of the GRU (acronym for Russian Military Intelligence).
The other device impacted the last two floors of a business center under construction on Lijachov Street, in the south of the capital, and apparently followed a flight path that could have as its destination the headquarters of the General Staff of the Russian army, in the southwest of Moscow.
The RIA Novosti agency mentions, based on an anonymous source from the emergency services, a third device – a quadcopter without explosives – that would have fallen in a cemetery in Zelenograd, a satellite city of Moscow to the northwest.
In parallel, Ukraine again launched an attack with 17 drones on Crimea yesterday. The Russian army claims to have shot down three unmanned aerial devices and diverted 14 devices from their route with radio-electronic resources (it says that 11 fell in the Black Sea, and three in Crimean territory).
The interim ruler of the annexed peninsula, Sergei Aksionov, confirmed that “firefighters are working tirelessly to put out the fire that broke out in an ammunition depot in the Dzhankoi region,” whose images on Ukrainian social networks, and accompanying comments, suggest that the fire was caused by the impact of one of the drones or its fragments, if intercepted.
Once again, as a precaution, rail traffic in Dzhankoi was temporarily suspended and the road connecting this town with Simferopol was closed, while Aksionov ordered the evacuation of the inhabitants of all towns within a radius of five kilometers.
Attack on ports on the Danube
For its part, also at dawn, Russia attacked two Ukrainian river ports for the first time, a few kilometers from the border with Romania and Moldova, on the Danube River, which is being considered one of the alternative routes to transport Ukrainian cereals, since the Black Sea became a conflict zone after Russia suspended guarantees to navigation.
The Ukrainian prosecutor’s office specified that, as a result of the incursion with 15 Iranian-made drones shahed-136In Reni and Izmail, at least six people were injured, four seriously, while four grain silos, as well as oil and fuel depots and an administration building were destroyed or damaged.
“This time, by attacking the Reni and Izmail terminals (river ports on the Danube) they (the Russians) are really trying to limit Ukrainian grain exports. The Danube (under current conditions) is a key route for exports with a monthly capacity of more than 2 million tons,” Andrei Sizov, an analyst at SovEkon company, wrote on Twitter.
However, in the opinion of other experts, this route is insufficient to compensate for the volumes of grains that were sent from three Ukrainian ports through the “humanitarian corridor”, facilitated by the food initiative of the Ngero Sea, sponsored by Turkey and the United Nations, and -at the same time- this now closed route is less relevant than others that Ukraine has to get its grains out.
“Since May 2022, the auxiliary land routes through Moldova and the border countries of the European Union have allowed Ukraine to export something like 40 million tons of grain, oil and related products, as well as 36 million tons of non-agricultural products, which is more than it was able to take out through the Black Sea food initiative (just over 30 million tons of grains),” the CEPA (acronym in English acronym for the Analysis Center of Grains) concluded in a recent study. European Policy, based in Washington).
