Flights from civilian airports in Moscow were temporarily restricted in the early morning on August 18 after authorities said that a downed Ukrainian drone had struck a building in the Russian capital.
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"At about 4 a.m. Moscow time, the Kyiv regime launched another terrorist attack using an unmanned aerial vehicle on objects located in Moscow and the Moscow region," the Russian Defense Ministry said.
The drone crashed into the Expo Center complex in a nonresidential district a few kilometers west of the city center. The drone, which the Russian Defense Ministry said it had shot down, reportedly caused a powerful explosion and sent emergency workers scrambling to the scene.
Kyiv did not immediately comment on the situation and no injuries were reported.
Air traffic at four major civilian airports in and around Moscow was suspended briefly following the incident, but flights were reportedly operating normally within an hour.
Moscow has been targeted regularly by drone strikes in recent months as Kyiv continues its counteroffensive to regain Ukrainian territory lost to Russian forces in the course of the 18-month-long war.
A drone was destroyed over the Kremlin and civilian areas of Moscow were hit in separate incidents in May. Earlier this month, a Moscow business district was targeted twice.
On the battlefront, Russia military officials on August 17 claimed success in an offensive in the eastern Donetsk region and said two Russian warships had repelled a Ukrainian sea drone in the Black Sea.
Ukrainian forces, meanwhile, announced they had liberated the village of Urozhayne, a village on the edge of Ukraine's eastern Donetsk region. The General Staff of the Ukrainian military said in its evening summary on August 17 that Russian forces made unsuccessful attempts to retake the village. If Ukraine holds Urozhayne, it would be the first settlement Kyiv has retaken since July 27.
The Russian Defense Ministry said that an attack by a Ukrainian sea drone had occurred just before 11 p.m. local time on the Black Sea about 240 kilometers southwest of Sevastopol, but was thwarted. The attack reportedly attempted to hit two Black Sea fleet warships tasked with overseeing navigation in the southwestern section of the Black Sea. The unmanned surface drone was destroyed by fire from the two ships, the ministry was reported as saying.
Ukraine’s Western backers have trained and supplied as many as nine new brigades in hopes that Ukrainian forces could successfully retake territory occupied by Russian forces, but two months into Ukraine's counteroffensive, Kyiv's forces have struggled to break through formidable Russian defensive lines in the southern Zaporizhzhya region and in the eastern Donetsk region.
On August 17, The Washington Post reported that an assessment by the U.S. intelligence community had concluded that the counteroffensive will fail to reach the southeastern city of Melitopol, preventing Kyiv from meeting its objective of severing Russia's land bridge to Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula, which was illegally annexed by Russia in 2014.