Ukraine just fired its biggest drone attack ever at Moscow's oil refinery
21 September 2026 · 21 September 2026Share
Drone operator Miroslava uses an FPV drone in the Pilotless Systems Unit of the Dnipro-based 128th Heavy Mechanized Brigade. File photo. ArmyInform · CC BY 4.0
Ukraine just fired more than 1,000 drones at Russia.
Hundreds of them were aimed at Moscow.
Moscow's mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, says it's the biggest drone attack the Russian capital has ever seen.
And it landed on the final day of Russia's first wartime parliamentary election.
So what actually hit?
Sobyanin says 450 drones were shot down before they even reached the city. But some got through. The Moscow Oil Refinery got damaged. So did a residential building.
One drone hit a 21-storey building in the Ramenskoye district and started a fire. 400 people had to leave their homes. 70 of them were children.
Now, the numbers on this get messy, so here's the breakdown.
Russia's Ministry of Defence says it shot down between 1,100 and 1,110 Ukrainian drones across the whole country, Crimea and the Black Sea, in that one day.
Sobyanin gave a different number. He said Russia has downed more than 1,600 drones since Saturday. That's a multi-day count. It's not the same figure as the ministry's one-day total.
What about people?
Andrei Vorobyov, the governor of the Moscow region, says the attack killed two people. A 74-year-old man. A 44-year-old woman. 20 more were wounded.
Then Al Jazeera reported an update. Vorobyov later said a third person had died of their injuries too.
And in Russian-occupied Kherson region, a drone hit a bus. People were killed, including a local election official. That's according to Ella Pamfilova, who runs Russia's Central Election Commission.
Here's the part Ukraine is proudest of.
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Night aerial view of a Moscow oil refinery captured by drone. File photo. Artem Svetlov from Moscow, Russia · CC BY 2.0
Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine's president, says Kyiv used its own domestically made missiles — Flamingo and Pelican — along with other missiles and drones, to hit Russian oil and logistics sites.
He says quote "these are billions of dollars that sustain the war machine".
But nobody has independently confirmed that Flamingo or Pelican missiles were actually used. The claim comes only from Zelenskyy's own post.
Sobyanin says the timing wasn't an accident either. He says quote "the enemy failed in this regard", meaning the vote went ahead anyway.
Voting also happened in four Ukrainian regions Russia annexed after the war began, and in Crimea, annexed back in 2014. Kyiv says all of that is illegal.
And Russia hit back overnight too.
In the Kyiv region, at least four people were killed. Three of them were children. A mother and her two three-year-old children died when a Russian drone hit a private home. That's according to emergency services and the regional governor, Tymur Tkachenko. A separately wounded girl later died in hospital.
Tkachenko says the Fastiv district got hit hardest. More than 24 sites were damaged — homes, industrial buildings, vehicles, even a farm.
In the Kherson region, Russian strikes killed at least three people and wounded nine. Among the dead: a 52-year-old woman, a 14-year-old girl, and a 39-year-old woman.
None of this is new for Ukraine.
Since Russia invaded more than four years ago, Ukraine has built its own long-range drone industry. It uses it, alongside missiles, to hit deep inside Russia.
Along the roughly 1,250-kilometre front line, the fighting itself has actually slowed down. Drones and ground robots on both sides are holding it in place. But the long-range strikes on cities and infrastructure just keep going.
The Moscow refinery has been hit before, too. In 2024 it processed 11.6 million tonnes of oil. That's 2.9 million tonnes of petrol and 3.2 million tonnes of diesel. Every strike on it cuts into Russia's fuel supply, and the money that funds the war.
One more thing happened alongside all this. Zelenskyy says he spoke with Donald Trump, the US president. The two have agreed to meet next week at the UN General Assembly in New York.
So what don't we know yet? The real damage to the refinery. Whether Flamingo and Pelican missiles were actually used. And the full count of the dead and wounded on both sides — it was still being updated as this story came together.
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