Ukrainian Drones Kill Two Near Moscow, Hit Refinery, on Final Day of Russia's Election

Two people are dead and roughly 20 injured after Ukraine hit the Moscow region with a massive overnight drone barrage, Russian officials said Sunday, September 20, on the final day of the country's three-day parliamentary elections.

Moscow Region Governor Andrei Vorobyev said a 44-year-old woman was killed in the village of Sofyino when a drone struck a three-story apartment building, injuring five others including two children. A second victim, an elderly man, died when his private home was destroyed in the Orekhovo-Zuyevo district. Vorobyev said 20 people in total were hurt, 15 of them hospitalized, according to Anadolu Agency.

The worst single incident hit a 21-story apartment block in Ramenskoye, where falling drone debris sparked a roof fire and forced the evacuation of about 400 residents, including 70 children, Vorobyev said. Twenty vehicles were damaged in that fire alone.

In Moscow itself, Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said drones reached the Moscow Oil Refinery and damaged a facility there, with no casualties reported. Reuters witnesses saw smoke rising from the site, according to the New York Post. The refinery processed 11.6 million metric tons of oil in 2024 and has been hit by Ukrainian strikes multiple times this year, the Post reported, part of a campaign that has knocked out a significant share of Russia's refining capacity and driven fuel shortages and gas station lines across the country.

Sobyanin said Russian air defenses shot down more than 1,600 drones since Saturday, including 450 headed for Moscow, calling it an "unprecedented attack." Russia's Defense Ministry put the broader overnight total at 1,110 drones destroyed across the country, Crimea, and the Black Sea, describing it via state agency TASS as the most massive attack since the start of the year. Vorobyev separately said 249 drones were intercepted over Moscow region alone in a two-hour window between 3 and 5 a.m. Those figures moved repeatedly through the morning as officials updated tallies, which is typical of early damage reporting from Moscow. None of these numbers come from an independent source, and Anadolu Agency noted that independent verification remains difficult given the ongoing war.

Sheremetyevo, Moscow's largest airport, imposed temporary restrictions, and Vnukovo halted all arrivals and departures overnight. Both airports lifted restrictions by Sunday morning, though some delays continued, according to the BBC.

An Election Under Fire

The strike hit on the last of three days of voting for Russia's State Duma, the first parliamentary election since Vladimir Putin's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. More than 111 million Russians were eligible to vote for all 450 Duma seats, according to Anadolu. Al Jazeera noted the vote is set to tighten Putin's 26-year grip on power, and that Moscow also organized voting in the Ukrainian territory it has seized.

Sobyanin accused Kyiv of timing the attack to disrupt the election. "The unprecedented attack was clearly planned with the aim of disrupting the elections," he wrote on Telegram. "The adversary failed to achieve this." That's Sobyanin's characterization of Ukraine's intent, not an established fact, and Ukraine has not responded to that specific claim. Ukraine's long-range drone campaign has for months targeted Russian energy infrastructure specifically to cut into Kremlin oil revenue that funds the war, a goal Kyiv officials have stated repeatedly regardless of election timing.

Deaths in Ukraine, Too

Russia's own strikes killed civilians the day before. Kyiv regional head Tymur Tkachenko said a mother and her two children died in a Russian attack on Fastiv on Saturday, with a separate strike in Vyshhorod later killing an injured child in hospital. In the Sumy region, four people died when a Russian drone hit their car, according to regional official Oleh Hryhorov. The BBC put the combined Saturday death toll in Kyiv and Sumy regions at eight, including three children. An earlier report put it at seven with two children, reflecting the toll rising as more victims were confirmed.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Saturday he had approved new long-range strikes and is "preparing to expand" Ukraine's long-range capabilities, according to Anadolu.

The Truce That Wasn't

President Trump claimed on Monday, September 14, that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to stop targeting each other's energy facilities. Six days later, both sides are still doing exactly that. On Friday, September 18, Trump signed a sanctions bill giving him authority to impose 100% tariffs on major buyers of Russian oil and gas, including China and India, according to the BBC.

Whether that sanctions leverage changes Moscow's calculus is unresolved. Russia has kept striking Ukrainian energy and logistics targets through the week, and Ukraine has kept hitting Russian refineries, undercutting Trump's claim of an energy truce almost as soon as he made it.