Hundreds of drones went toward Moscow and its surrounding region on the last day of Russia’s parliamentary vote, and at least three people died. Authorities reported the attack on Sunday. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said it damaged one of Russia’s “key oil industry facilities.”
Moscow’s mayor, Sergey Sobyanin, said more than 1,600 drones had been intercepted and shot down, 450 of them aimed at the capital. The Guardian noted that such figures are often exaggerated and that Ukraine’s daily drone fire rate was estimated in the low hundreds. Sobyanin said a facility on the grounds of the Moscow oil refinery was damaged, with no casualties there, and that the plant had been struck before in recent months.
Deaths, a fire and a disputed weapon
The dead included a 44-year-old woman and an elderly man, killed in separate incidents. Regional governor Andrey Vorobyov said a drone crashed into a 21-storey building, starting a fire that forced 400 people to be evacuated. He did not say where the drone came from.
Zelenskyy said the weapons included the Pelican, which was first taken for a short-range ballistic missile. Military sources later described it as a winged drone. He gave no further detail, and the confusion produced Ukrainian media reports of a ballistic missile before doubts set in. The Pelican was first thought to be the FP-7 from Fire Point, Ukraine’s most successful long-range drone and missile maker. That company is also working on the FP-9, with a range of more than 500 miles, and a test flight is expected later this autumn.
Zelenskyy added that Ukraine fired its home-built Flamingo cruise missiles at Moscow. Ukrainian and Russian Telegram channels posted pictures of what they called Flamingo debris in the Moscow region, though the claims could not be independently verified. Ruslan Leviev, head of the open-source group Conflict Intelligence Team, said the wreckage probably came from a Flamingo.
Sobyanin accused Kyiv of trying to disrupt the three-day election. “The unprecedented attack was clearly planned with the aim of disrupting the elections. The enemy did not succeed,” he wrote on Telegram. Voting began on Friday in the first parliamentary elections since the February 2022 invasion. Only parties backing Putin and the military campaign were registered, and few Russians doubt that United Russia will win again. The strike followed a Monday statement from US president Donald Trump that Ukraine and Russia had agreed not to hit each other’s energy facilities.
A fuel crisis spreads
The strikes fit a pattern that has built since the start of 2026. Writing for the Atlantic Council, Georgetown University’s Ana Lejava said the stepped-up drone campaign on Russian energy sites has set off the country’s worst fuel crisis since the Soviet Union collapsed. By late August, more than 70 percent of Russian gas stations had reportedly run dry. Refineries were running at historic lows. Moscow banned exports of a range of fuels and began importing gasoline from India for the first time.
Rationing is now in place in more than half of Russia’s administrative regions, and even Moscow has felt shortages. Security forces have been posted at gas stations in some areas. In Volgograd, several residents were detained after filming a video appeal asking officials to address the lack of fuel.
Lejava wrote that the pressure reaches places that rely on Russian supply. South Ossetia depends on Rosneft, which has run its filling stations since 2019. In Abkhazia, Georgian authorities allowed roughly three hundred tons of petrol through this summer, the first Tbilisi-supplied fuel in more than three decades. Tajikistan’s energy minister said in late August that his country had roughly sixty days of reserves left. Kazakhstan cut energy exports after strikes damaged Caspian Pipeline Consortium infrastructure in Russia, which accounts for around 80 percent of its oil exports.
In July, Kazakh leader Kassym-Jomart Tokayev told Putin publicly that the war in Ukraine should end.
Sources
- Ukrainian drone strikes are disarming Russia's energy weapon
- Ukraine targets Moscow with hundreds of drones on final day of Russian election
