# Russia Reports 150 Drones Over the Moscow Region and Renewed Airport Shutdowns

Moscow's mayor called it the largest drone attack on the region in two years, with 620 aircraft involved and three people injured, including a child, in accounts that cannot be independently verified.

- Published: 2026-08-18T05:17:18.667Z
- Canonical: https://polylog.news/2026-08-18/russia-reports-150-drones-over-the-moscow-region-and-renewed
- Publisher: Polylog (Global desk)
- Section: geopolitics
- Sources: [TASS](https://tass.com/politics/2174429), [RIA Novosti](https://ria.ru/20260818/vsu-2111485769.html), [TASS (Russian)](https://tass.ru/ekonomika/28020843), [RIA Novosti](https://ria.ru/20260818/mid-2111485606.html)

Sergei Sobyanin, the mayor of Moscow, said [620 drones targeted the Moscow region](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/8/18/russia-says-more-than-600-drones-targeted-moscow-region) between Monday evening and 5 a.m. Tuesday, calling it the largest such attack on the capital in two years. He said air defence units destroyed 180 of the drones overnight, with more intercepted afterward. Andrey Vorobyov, the governor of the Moscow region, said three people were injured, among them a 10-year-old girl, according to the state agency TASS. A drone struck a warehouse operated by the online retailer Wildberries in the Bogorodsky district, and two residential buildings in Kirzhach, in Vladimir region, were [also damaged](https://tass.ru/proisshestviya/28020841), the agency reported.

Air traffic absorbed the disruption. Flight operations at Moscow's Vnukovo, Domodedovo and Zhukovsky airports were temporarily halted, Sheremetyevo operated under partial restrictions, and [additional restrictions were introduced at Krasnodar](https://tass.ru/ekonomika/28020843) for flight safety reasons. RIA Novosti reported that 15 people died in Belgorod region over the past week [in attacks attributed to Ukrainian forces](https://ria.ru/20260818/vsu-2111485769.html), and that the foreign ministry official Rodion Miroshnik [named the regions with the highest number of casualties](https://ria.ru/20260818/mid-2111485606.html).

All of these accounts come from Russian officials and state agencies, and none has been confirmed by independent monitors. Ukraine has not commented publicly on the individual strikes described. What can be observed from outside is the pattern: an attack that Russian officials themselves describe as their largest in two years, followed by renewed closures of airports serving Moscow, Krasnodar and other hubs, which impose costs on carriers and passengers whether or not any given drone reaches its target.

Those interruptions are now a routine feature of Russian civil aviation rather than exceptional events, and they fall on an airline sector already operating under sanctions that restrict access to Western aircraft parts and maintenance.

## What this means

Repeated airspace closures raise the operating cost of Russian aviation through fuel burned in holding patterns, crew duty limits and missed connections, and they raise domestic insurance and security spending in regions far from the front. Russian carriers and the federal budget that supports them carry that cost. The wider signal is that the war is now a persistent internal risk for Russia rather than a border conflict, which is the condition that makes negotiated pauses harder for either government to sell at home.

## What to watch

- How often Moscow-area airports suspend operations in a given week, a measurable proxy for how deep the strike campaign is reaching.
- Whether Russian authorities extend flight restrictions to southern airports serving oil export infrastructure, which would connect the drone campaign to energy logistics.
- Any independent confirmation of casualty figures from monitors outside Russia, since all current numbers come from one side.