A drone crashed on Tuesday, February 28, near a village in the Moscow region, the local governor said, adding that the device was “probably” targeting civilian infrastructure, amid fears of Ukrainian attacks in Russia. Several incidents involving drones have occurred in recent months on Russian territory, sometimes very far from the front in Ukraine, but this is the first time that such a report has taken place in the capital region.
“There are no casualties or destruction on the ground,” Governor Andrei Vorobyov said on Telegram, adding that the drone crashed near the town of Gubastovo, about 100 kilometers southeast of Moscow. . “The target was probably a civilian facility that was not damaged,” he noted on Telegram. He gave no further details, but the village of Gubastovo is located near a gas giant Gazprom compressor station.
The regional Energy Ministry, quoted by the Ria-Novosti news agency, assured that the fall of this drone had not caused any “crisis situation” and that the gas distribution network was operating “normally”.
In addition, the Russian army said on Tuesday that it shot down two Ukrainian drones during the night which targeted civilian infrastructure in southwestern Russia. “The Kiev regime attempted to attack civilian infrastructure sites in the Krasnodar region and the Republic of Adygea with drones,” the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement. “Both drones […] were neutralized” without doing any damage, he said.
The authorities of another Russian region, that of Bryansk, bordering Ukraine, also announced in the morning that a Ukrainian drone had been shot down there. The incident caused “neither casualties nor damage”, assured on Telegram the governor of the Bryansk region, Alexander Bogomaz.
The remains of three drones were also discovered overnight in the streets of residential areas of Belgorod, the capital of an eponymous region also bordering Ukraine, according to regional governor Vyacheslav Gladkov.
Since the start of the Russian offensive in Ukraine in February 2022, localities and infrastructure in the Russian regions bordering this former Soviet republic have repeatedly suffered strikes, in particular drone strikes, often fatal, attributed by Moscow to the Ukrainian army. And several Russian airbases, some hundreds of kilometers from the front, have been hit by Ukrainian drones, according to Moscow.
At the end of December, the Russian army claimed that three of its soldiers had been killed by the debris of a Ukrainian drone shot down as it approached an airbase in the Saratov region, 500 km from the Ukrainian border.
Consult our file: War in Ukraine