Sergei Sobyanin, the Mayor of Moscow, gave updates through the night. First he said 59 drones had been shot down. Then he raised that to 94, destroyed between 11pm and 8am. He said crews were at the crash sites, but gave no damage details. None of these numbers are independently confirmed.
Russian aviation officials say the airports started reopening around 5am this morning.
That's everything we know.
Why this mattersSo here's the bigger picture.
This is the second time in under a week that Moscow's airports have shut down like this. The last one was two days ago, on 14 October, when Sobyanin said around 90 drones were downed.
Now, Ukrainian monitoring channels say a Yandex data centre in Vladimir Oblast was hit in the same overnight attack. That's 500 kilometres from the Ukrainian border. The Kyiv Independent carried that report — and says it cannot confirm the target or the damage itself. Ukraine hasn't commented.
But here's the thing. This isn't a new target.
That same Vladimir site was hit five days ago, on 11 October. Yandex said it was completely shut down afterwards. And that wasn't even the first strike. Sasovo, in Ryazan Oblast, was hit on 8 October. Kaluga Oblast was hit on 9 October. Yandex runs six major data centres in Russia. Three of them have now been hit. Two are completely down.
So if tonight's report is confirmed, that's the fourth hit on Yandex in just over a week. Not a sudden shift in strategy. A pattern that's been building for days.
Elsewhere overnight, Rostov Oblast's governor, Yuri Slusar, said production and storage sites were damaged and a fire broke out in the town of Aksay. Chertkovsky district and the city of Bataysk were hit too. Yaroslavl Oblast declared a "red" drone-threat level and briefly shut the road out of the city toward Moscow. Its governor, Mikhail Evraev, said electronic warfare took down eight drones there, with no injuries.
Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine's President, said last month that Ukraine would retaliate in kind for Russian strikes on Ukrainian data centres. He also said Russian skies would become "de facto closed", with drones appearing over Russia on a scale that would have to be taken into account.
Sobyanin says the destroyed-drone count is 94 for the night.
That's Russia's own capital saying it faced its biggest drone wave yet this week. For the second time in two days.
What we don't know: whether the Vladimir data centre was actually hit, and what damage it took. Whether 94 is the real number, or just what Russia wants people to believe. And whether Moscow's airports, open again this morning, make it through the rest of the week without another shutdown.
