After the brief ceasefire to allow Putin to hold his Victory Day parade, Moscow launched a blitz of drone attacks on Kiev.
Russia carried out its largest aerial attack over a two-day period since the start of its war in Ukraine, pounding the capital Kyiv and other cities with hundreds of drones, Ukrainian officials said on Thursday.
Russia had launched 1,567 drones since the start of Wednesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said. At least 27 civilians have been killed over the two days, officials said.
And in the past, that would have been it. President Biden was happy to send U.S. weapons to Ukraine but for years those weapons were limited to strikes inside the borders of Ukraine. It wasn’t until his final months in office that Biden finally took the gloves off.
But the U.S. restrictions meant that Ukraine was forced to develop its own long-range drones and now it has done that. So after the attack on Kiev, Ukraine did something it has never really done before. It counter-attacked Moscow with its own drones.
It was the largest and deadliest attack on the Russian capital region since President Vladimir Putin ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and it showed Kyiv’s increasing ability to carry out long-range strikes and penetrate air defenses.
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said Sunday that more than 120 drones were intercepted near the capital over 24 hours, and Russia’s Defense Ministry said 556 Ukrainian drones were shot down over Russia overnight.
Ukraine used three different types of fixed-wing drones to carry out the attacks.
The General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces said in a statement on Sunday that it used the FP-1 Firepoint and RS-1 Bars winged drones to hit several targets in the Moscow area.
A previously unknown third type of drone, called the Bars-SM Gladiator, was also used in the attack, the statement added…
Ukraine has increasingly sought to demonstrate the effectiveness of these drones, newly developed and relatively cheap in the realm of long-range weapons, by ramping up strikes deep into Russian territory and against Moscow. The capital is home to Russia’s densest air defense network by far.
One of the targets was an oil refinery.
Our responses to Russia’s prolongation of the war and its attacks on our cities and communities are entirely justified. This time, Ukrainian long-range sanctions reached the Moscow region, and we are clearly telling the Russians: their state must end its war. Ukrainian drone and… pic.twitter.com/BVFJ1BJQ1i
— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) May 17, 2026
But other drones struck civilian apartment buildings.
🇷🇺⚔️🇺🇦 MOSCOU DANS LA TOURMENTE : LA PLUS GRANDE ATTAQUE DE DRONES UKRAINIENS EN PLUS D’UN AN
Cette nuit, l’Ukraine a lancé une offensive massive de plus de 500 drones kamikazes sur la région de Moscou, la plus importante depuis le début du conflit. Malgré la destruction de 556… pic.twitter.com/kfoOzwZLjc
— Camille Moscow 🇷🇺 🌿 ☦️ (@camille_moscow) May 17, 2026
The unspoken rule for the past four years has been that Russian would say nothing critical about Putin’s war in Ukraine so long as it didn’t have any effect on them. And thanks to U.S. restrictions under Joe Biden, Putin was mostly able to keep that promise. A thousand people a day might be dying on the front lines but in Moscow everything was normal. But now Ukrainian drones are starting to break through the Russian air defenses even in areas where some wealthy Russians have second homes.
The deaths and the increasing vulnerability of the Moscow region — including in areas where the capital’s residents have their country homes and weekend cabins — were likely to increase pressure on Putin, who is confronting rising public frustration over the war, now in its fifth year.
One woman was killed and another was trapped under rubble after a drone hit a house in Khimki, a suburb north of the capital, the governor of the Moscow region said. Andrei Vorobyov, the governor, said air defense forces began repelling the attack at 3 a.m.
A man and woman were killed in the village of Pogorelki in the Mytishchi district, also north of the capital, when a drone hit a house under construction, local authorities said.
Russia is still able to kill far more civilians in Kiev than Ukraine can kill in Moscow, but until very recently this was a completely one-sided equation. Now that’s starting to change. And that is going to add more pressure on Putin to bring this to an end as Russians, for the first time, begin thinking that killing civilians with drones is not such a good idea.
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