(Reuters) – Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said early on Friday that air defence units had intercepted three separate attacks by Ukrainian drones headed for Russia’s capital.
Sobyanin, writing on the Telegram messaging app, said air defence units southeast of the capital in the Kolomna and Ramenskoye district had repelled one group of “enemy” drones, without specifying how many were involved.
“At the site where fragments fell, no damage or casualties have occurred,” Sobyanin wrote on the Telegram messaging app, without specifying how many drones were involved. “Specialist emergency crews are at the site.”
The mayor posted two more announcements in quick succession.
Sobyanin said two drones also headed for Moscow had been downed by air defences in Podolsk district, south of the capital. He then reported a single drone downed in Troitsky district, in the southwest of the capital.
Specialist emergency crews were dispatched to all the sites, Sobyanin said.
Russian news agencies quoted Rosaviatsiya, the federal aviation agency, as saying two Moscow airports, Vnukovo and Domodedovo, had suspended all flights.
Russia’s Defence Ministry had earlier said that it had destroyed 49 Ukrainian drones over a three-hour period late on Thursday, most of them over the Kursk region near the Ukrainian border.
The ministry, in a report on Telegram, said 37 drones had been destroyed solely in the Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces hold chunks of land after a mass incursion last August.
It said the drones had been destroyed between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. Moscow time (1600-1900 GMT).
Unofficial Russian Telegram channels had reported a “large number” of drones over Kursk region and posted videos of explosions.
The ministry statement said drones had also been destroyed over the border regions of Bryansk and Belgorod and the Russian-annexed Crimea peninsula.
(Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Jamie Freed)
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