Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said on Tuesday May 30 that the Russian capital had been the target of a drone attack for the second time since the beginning of May. “This morning at dawn, a drone attack caused minor damage to several buildings. All the city’s emergency services are on site […] No one has been seriously injured so far,” the mayor wrote on Telegram. Moscow is more than 1,000 kilometers from Ukraine.
Images of the attack were shared on social media. In particular, we can see traces of smoke in the sky, as well as the window of a broken building. In early May, two drones were shot down over the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin’s seat of Russian power. The attack was blamed on Ukrainian forces.
The governor of the Moscow region, Andrey Vorobyov, said that several drones had been shot down near the capital. “This morning, residents of some districts of the Moscow region could hear the sound of explosions, it was our air defense system. Several drones were shot down on the approach to Moscow,” he said.
kyiv targeted by an attack
This strike responds to another Russian attack, which kyiv was the target of during the night. She would have made at least one victim, according to the mayor of the city Vitali Klitschko. On Monday, Russian strikes in the middle of the day had also caused panic in the Ukrainian capital, targeted on multiple occasions since the beginning of May.
According to the city’s civil and military administration, 20 people were evacuated from the affected building. “The two upper floors are destroyed, there may be people under the rubble,” she also said on Telegram. Earlier in the night, the mayor of kyiv announced that a woman had been hospitalized after the collapse of a building in the Holosiivsky district.
Civil-military administration says night attack was carried out using drones, and other debris falls set fire to house in Darnytskyi neighborhood, also in south from the city, and three cars in the central district of Pechersky. Debris also fell on a business in the Svyatoshynskyi district in western Kyiv.
Ukraine imposes sanctions on Iran
On Monday evening, Ukrainian deputies adopted a draft sanction against Iran. The country is accused of supplying arms to Russia. “This resolution synchronizes Ukrainian sanctions with the actions of the entire civilized world on the path to the complete isolation of Iran,” the Ukrainian parliament said on its website.
This sanction package, which still needs to be signed by President Volodymyr Zelensky in order to be promulgated, includes a ban on military trade with Iran, but also the halting of transit through Ukrainian territory of the goods in question, as well as as the “suspension of economic and financial obligations in favor of Iranian residents”.
Iran is a close partner of Russia and is accused by kyiv and the West of supplying weapons used by Moscow for its invasion of Ukraine, including Shahed explosive drones. “Iran today is a terrorist regime that poses a threat to Europe and the Middle East,” Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podoliak tweeted on Sunday.
Ukrainian Defense Minister “optimistic” about counter-offensive
Oleksiy Reznikov, the Ukrainian Minister of Defense gave an interview on Tuesday to the French daily Ouest-France. He mentions in particular the imminent counter-offensive of the Ukrainian army against the Russian forces: “We want to break the will of the Russians to win this war”, launches the minister, affirming that this counter-offensive aims to return to the “borders of 1991 internationally recognised”.
According to him, this major movement which promises to be “will trigger a new withdrawal of the Russians from our territory”. Oleksiy Reznikov also took advantage of the interview to insist on the urgency of arms deliveries to Ukraine promised by its Western allies. “My dream would be to have them for the end of the year, to say that Santa Claus really exists,” he joked, referring to the F-16 fighter jets promised by the Americans to Ukraine.