Putin Faces Increased Pressure as Moscow Is Again Attacked by Drones
The Russian authorities said 419 drones were shot down across Russia, including in the capital, and in Crimea.
A photograph posted on the Moscow region’s official social media channel on Tuesday, said to show a damaged private house in the town of Yegoryevsk.
Andrei Vorobyov, via Telegram, via Reuters
By Paul Sonne, Ivan Nechepurenko and John Yoon
June 30, 2026
Updated 12:06 p.m. ET
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia faced a fresh round of pressure on Tuesday as Ukraine launched another attack on the Russian capital, continued to disrupt Russian fuel supplies and pressed its campaign to cut off Crimea, the peninsula Moscow annexed from Ukraine in 2014.
Moscow’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, reported several waves of drones, starting Monday night, less than two weeks after Ukraine launched the biggest drone assault on the Russian capital since the start of the war. The mayor said on Telegram that Russian air defenses had shot down more than 60 drones on approach to Moscow, and that emergency services were working at crash sites. He did not mention any injuries.
The governor of the Moscow region said the attack had killed a 6-month-old child in a town about 60 miles south of the capital.
Overall, including those in Moscow and in Crimea, 419 drones were shot down, the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement.
Ukrainian authorities made no immediate public comment.
With drones saturating the front lines, Russia has struggled to make progress on the battlefield in eastern Ukraine, where the Kremlin aims to take the rest of the Donetsk region. After a difficult May, Russian forces have begun inching forward again, and they increasingly bomb the remaining Ukrainian strongholds in the region.
Ukraine, however, has subjected Russia to increasingly large drone attacks, eroding Mr. Putin’s ability to isolate Russian society from the war.
Russia has been launching such large-scale barrages against Ukraine for some time, but advances in Ukraine’s drone production and technology have now allowed Kyiv to send bigger swarms of drones in the other direction.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has called the strike campaign “long-range sanctions,” and has described its goal as pressuring Mr. Putin to end the war.
But Mr. Putin has dug in, noting in comments last Sunday that Ukraine’s actions would not deter Russia from its goal of conquering territory in eastern Ukraine.
In an interview with a Russian state-run broadcaster, he struck a note of defiance, saying he would pursue the “final liberation of Donbas and Novorossiya.” The term Novorossiya was revived by the Kremlin in 2014 to promote territorial claims over eastern and southern Ukraine.
He said the attacks on Russian infrastructure causing fuel shortages were “creating problems.”
“We are currently seeing certain shortages, although they are not critical,” Mr. Putin said in the interview.
He added that while the Ukrainian attacks were painful, Russian strikes against Ukraine inflicted more damage.
Russian security personnel were standing guard in central Moscow on Monday.
Anastasia Barashkova/Reuters
“Our retaliatory strikes deep inside Ukrainian territory are far more powerful, more effective and, frankly, more destructive, resulting in genuinely serious consequences,” Mr. Putin said.
The June 18 drone attack by Ukraine injured at least 17 people in the Moscow region. It targeted a major oil refinery and forced the city’s four airports to close temporarily. The Russian Defense Ministry later said that it had downed almost 1,000 drones across the country during the attack.
Mr. Zelensky said the attack was a response to a strike on a religious complex in Kyiv. Russia claimed that the complex had been hit by an errant Ukrainian interceptor missile.
Tuesday’s assault on Moscow came amid a Ukrainian campaign to target Russian refineries and fuel facilities that has led to shortages of gasolines and lines at gas stations across Russia.
After the attacks, Russia’s federal aviation watchdog briefly issued emergency restrictions at major airports serving Moscow, citing flight safety reasons, now a regular occurrence in the Russian capital.
The agency, Rosaviatsiya, said on Telegram that three out of four international airports serving Moscow had to briefly suspend operations overnight.
The 6-month-old child who died in Tuesday’s attack was in a home in Yegoryevsk, a town southeast of Moscow, that caught fire after a drone fell on it, the regional governor, Andrei Vorobyov, said in a statement. Rescuers extricated residents from the house, he said, but the child died on the way to the hospital.
“Civilians are suffering and children are dying — this is the result of the actions of the Kyiv regime,” the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said in a statement to journalists after the attack.
In Ukraine, Mr. Zelensky said in an overnight address on Monday, before the strike on Moscow, that Ukraine’s drone attacks were “bringing the reality of the war back to Russia.”
Mr. Zelensky noted lines of cars at gas stations as attacks on Russian refineries, pumping stations and export ports whittled away at the oil industry.
“We are ensuring the results Ukraine needs so that the aggressor state cannot keep the war ‘somewhere over there,’” Mr. Zelensky said.
The United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine reported on Monday that Russia’s military had killed 1,272 civilians and wounded another 6,871 in government-controlled areas of Ukraine over the six month period ending on May 31.
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Andrew E. Kramer contributed reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine.
Paul Sonne is an international correspondent, focusing on Russia and the varied impacts of President Vladimir V. Putin’s domestic and foreign policies, with a focus on the war against Ukraine.
Ivan Nechepurenko covers Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, the countries of the Caucasus and Central Asia. He divides his reporting time between Moscow and Tbilisi, Georgia.
John Yoon is a Times reporter based in Seoul who covers breaking and trending news.
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"Putin Faces Increased Pressure as Moscow Is Again Attacked by Drones"
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