(Reuters) – Russian air defense units downed 16 Moscow-bound Ukrainian drones throughout the day on Wednesday, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said.
Sobyanin, in a series of posts on the Telegram messaging app, said the drones were repelled over a period of about 17 hours. Emergency crews were examining fragments where they hit the ground but no damage was reported.
Two of the four major airports servicing the capital limited operations for a time, Russia’s civil aviation authority said on Telegram.
The Russian defense ministry said its air defense units destroyed 172 Ukrainian drones overnight, nearly half of them over regions bordering Ukraine.
Ukraine’s military said its drones overnight had struck the Yefremov synthetic rubber plant in Russia’s Tula region, south of Moscow, and a storage facility for marine drones in Russian-occupied Crimea.
Tula regional governor Dmitry Milyaev said debris from a downed Ukrainian drone sparked a fire at an industrial site, but did not identify the facility.
He said that Russian air defense units destroyed 12 Ukrainian drones over the region.
Ukraine has stepped up drone strikes deep inside Russia, saying it is targeting military, energy and logistics sites to disrupt Moscow’s war effort, in response to Russia’s continued strikes on Ukraine.
(Reporting by Lidia Kelly in Melbourne; Editing by Himani Sarkar, Michael Perry, Ron Popeski and Edmund Klamann)