Two drones shot down near Moscow, says Russia
Two Ukrainian combat drones headed for Moscow were shot down, Russian officials said on Wednesday, the latest attack targeting the capital.
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said on Telegram, “Two combat drones’ attempt to fly into the city was recorded. Both were shot down by air defence.”
Emergency services were at the scene, he said, but he did not list any casualties.
He said one drone was downed in the Domodedovo area on the southern outskirts of the city, while the second was shot down in the Minsk highway area, west of the capital.
“Air defence destroyed two UAVs,” the Russia’s defence ministry said, adding there were no reported casualties or damage.
Germany’s Handelsblatt newspaper reported on Tuesday evening that the buyer was arms maker Rheinmetall which planned to prepare most of them for export to Ukraine. The company and the German defence ministry did not comment.
The German-made Leopards were at the centre of a public spat earlier this year after Belgian defence minister Ludivine Dedonder said it considered buying the tanks but accused the firm of trying to make a “huge profit” from the sale. Versluys at the time denied that the Belgian government had approached him.
The clash underlined a predicament faced by western governments trying to find weapons for Ukraine after more than a year of intense warfare – arms they discarded as obsolete are now in high demand, and often owned by private companies.
“The fact that they leave our company proves that we asked for a fair market price and someone was more than happy to take them,” Versluys said in a post on LinkedIn on Tuesday, accompanied by a picture of tanks next to a bottle of Ukrainian vodka.
Dozens of secondhand Leopard 1 tanks that once belonged to Belgium have been bought by a major European country for the Ukrainian army fighting Russia, according to the arms trader who sold them.
Freddy Versluys, CEO of the private defence company OIP Land Systems, told the Guardian that he sold 49 tanks to another European government, which he could not name due to a confidentiality clause. He said he also could not disclose the price. Versluys added it could be up to six months before they were on the battlefield in Ukraine.
Versluys previously bought 50 Leopard 1 tanks for €37,000 each (about £29,600) that the Belgian government decommissioned in 2014 as part of a wider trend among western countries of cutting defence spending.
Ukrainian officials on Tuesday accused the Kremlin’s forces of targeting rescue workers
In case you missed this last night: Ukrainian officials have accused Russia of targeting rescue workers during the attack on Pokrovsk.
Moscow struck residential buildings with two consecutive missiles, with Ukrainian officials saying that the first one was aimed at drawing rescue workers to the scene and the second one at wounding or killing them.
The strikes Monday evening in the downtown district of the city of Pokrovsk killed at least nine people, Zelenskiy said, including an emergency official. The number of injured climbed to 82, most of them police officers, emergency workers and soldiers who rushed to assist residents, Ukrainian officials said.
Emergency crews were still removing rubble on Tuesday. The Iskander missiles, which have an advanced guidance system that increases their accuracy, hit within 40 minutes of each other, according to Donetsk Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko said.
Drones shot down over Moscow are latest in series of attacks
Until a series of drone attacks in recent months, Moscow, Russia’s capital, had not been a target during the conflict, AFP reports.
On July 30, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned that “war” was coming to Russia, and in particular, to the country’s “symbolic centres and military bases”.
An office block in the capital’s main business district was recently struck twice within days by debris from a downed drone attack. Russia’s defence ministry said Thursday it had downed seven drones – also near Kaluga, which is less than 200 kilometres (124 miles) southwest of Moscow.