Russia thwarts 'massive' Ukrainian drone attack

MOSCOW

Russia said on Sunday that it had thwarted a "massive" Ukrainian drone attack by downing 158 drones across 15 regions, including two over the capital Moscow.

A coal-fired power plant near the city was reported hit, as was an oil refinery within the city boundaries.

Russia's Defense Ministry said most of the drones, 122, were downed over the regions of Kursk, Bryansk, Voronezh and Belgorod which border Ukraine.

"Our defenders are repelling an attempted massive UAV attack on the territory of the Bryansk region," regional governor Aleksandr Bogomaz said.

The barrage comes just days after Ukraine's energy infrastructure was targeted by over 200 Russian drones and missiles in one of the biggest such attacks.

It is also nearly a month since Ukraine went on the offensive in Russia's Kursk region, even as Russian troops continue their steady advance in eastern Ukraine.

Both sides have targeted energy infrastructure since Russia began its campaign in Ukraine in February 2022.

A local official in the Moscow region said three drones had tried to hit the Kashira coal-fired power station.

"There were no victims nor damages," he said, adding that electricity was still reaching clients "correctly".

Russian news agencies also reported a fire at the Moscow oil refinery in Kapotnya, though mayor Sergei Sobyanin said there was "no damage or casualties."

In the Belgorod region, Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said: "The glass of three residential buildings in Belgorod is damaged. In one private residence, a utility building was completely destroyed."

Meanwhile, independent Russian media outlet Mediazona said according to its estimates more than 66,000 Russian military personnel have died during the war in Ukraine.

Mediazona has been drawing up a list of known soldier deaths in conjunction with the BBC Russian Service using open-source data.

Previously in April, the outlet announced it had found more than 50,000 names of Russians killed.

Mediazona said on Aug. 31 that "as of Aug. 30, we know the names of 66,471 Russian soldiers killed in the war."

The list has gone up by more than 4,600 in the last four weeks, it said, while stressing this was not a definitive figure since many soldiers' deaths are not made public.

Anastasia Alekseyeva, a journalist at Mediazona, stressed that the latest death numbers were "not linked to Ukraine's offensive in the Kursk region or Russia's advance in the east."

This is because researchers are still working through a backlog of death reports, she said.

The report found that 172 conscripts doing national service have been killed in the war, with the highest figures in early months.

However, these figures may be inexact since conscripts can sign professional army contracts and some may have done so without telling relatives, Mediazona editor Dmitry Treshchanin said.