Ukraine resumes Moscow drone strikes after CIA director Ratcliffe's departure

Ukraine's drone campaign resumed against Moscow in the predawn hours of Wednesday, hours after CIA Director John Ratcliffe's plane lifted off from Vnukovo Airport. The timing was not coincidental. Kyiv had agreed to a temporary halt on strikes against the Russian capital during Ratcliffe's unannounced Tuesday visit—a concession to the United States that held through his departure. Once his aircraft cleared Russian airspace, the campaign resumed.

Moscow's Mayor Sergey Sobyanin reported at least ten drones shot down as they approached the city. Emergency crews worked debris fields across the capital as Russia's federal aviation authority imposed temporary flight restrictions at three of Moscow's four major international airports: Domodedovo, Zhukovsky, and Vnukovo. The disruptions rippled outward—flight restrictions spread to nine additional airports across western and central Russia, from Kaluga to Kazan, a geographic footprint that underscored the scale of the overnight assault.

The attack on Moscow was part of a much larger operation. Russia's Defense Ministry claimed its air defenses destroyed 426 Ukrainian drones across fifteen regions and occupied Crimea. Among the confirmed strikes were two significant infrastructure targets. In Kotovsk, in the Tambov region, a Wildberries e-commerce logistics center caught fire, consuming more than 100,000 square meters. The company suspended all new shipments to the facility. Roughly 150 kilometers away, in Nizhny Novgorod, a Lukoil oil refinery came under attack. Regional Governor Gleb Nikitin said local defenses intercepted more than forty drones aimed at the facility, but not before damage reached an industrial complex, several residential buildings, and parked vehicles.

Ukraine's drone and cruise missile manufacturer, Fire Point, claimed responsibility for both strikes. Ukraine's General Staff confirmed the refinery attack and noted that the facility supplies the Russian military. The pattern was deliberate: Ukraine was targeting not just military assets but the economic sinews that sustain Russia's war effort. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukrainian forces had struck sixteen facilities across Russia in the previous twenty-four hours—oil infrastructure, airfields, and a missile unit. "The war must return to where it came from," he wrote on social media, framing the campaign as a response to Russian aggression and a way to raise the cost of the conflict for Moscow.

The human toll was mounting on both sides. In Russia, two people died when a drone struck a home in the Lipetsk region; nine others were injured across Lipetsk, Belgorod, Voronezh, and Tula. In Ukraine, Russian drone strikes killed a woman and a four-year-old girl in the northern Chernihiv region, with a fourteen-year-old girl wounded. The State Emergency Service reported fires in the Sumy and Kherson regions from Russian attacks, though without casualties in those locations.

Ukraine's air force reported that Russia had launched 162 drones into the country overnight and into Wednesday morning. Ukrainian air defenses intercepted or suppressed 134 of them. Confirmed hits were recorded in eighteen locations. The exchange reflected the grinding intensity of the air war: both sides launching hundreds of unmanned systems in a single night, both sides claiming significant interception rates, both sides absorbing strikes on civilian and military targets. The Ratcliffe visit had created a brief pause in one direction of fire. The resumption suggested that pause was always meant to be temporary—a diplomatic courtesy that neither side expected to alter the underlying trajectory of the conflict.