Ukraine's Biggest-Ever Moscow Barrage Sets the Capital's Refinery Ablaze
Ukraine timed its largest attack of the war on Moscow to the Duma election’s final day: more than a thousand drones plus missiles overnight — the mayor calling it the “largest ever” against the capital, 450 downed on approach — with the Gazprom Neft refinery at Kapotnya, fifteen kilometres from the Kremlin, burning at its primary units. The new Flamingo cruise missile flew alongside, per Mr Zelensky, the debut Pelican ballistic missile: “These are billions of dollars that sustain the war machine.” Two died in the Moscow region; Russia’s counter-barrage killed three in Kyiv region, two of them children.
A thousand drones against Moscow rewrites the war’s production arithmetic in public: Ukraine can now saturate the most defended airspace in Russia on a chosen night, with domestically-built cruise and ballistic missiles riding the swarm — the Pelican’s debut converting years of industrial improvisation into a strategic missile programme no sanction reaches. Striking the capital’s own refinery during the vote makes the point at two registers at once: to voters, that the Kremlin’s war delivers war; to negotiators, that Ukraine’s leverage compounds while talks stall. The election-night timing was itself the message’s envelope. Watch Moscow’s fuel market in the coming days — a capital queuing for petrol is the image the Kremlin has spent three years preventing.