On the morning of May 30, Moscow was attacked by unmanned aerial vehicles. Three apartment blocks were damaged as a result of the attack.
The drones crashed into a high-rise building on Atlasov Street, into a block of flats on Profsoyuznaya Street, hitting the window of an apartment on the 16th floor, and into a building on Leninsky Prospekt.
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said that no one was seriously injured.
Various types of drones were used for the attack. For example, the drone that hit the apartment building on Profsoyuznaya Street was armed with a KZ-6 beehive-shaped charge.
The KZ-6 charge is designed to pierce through protective armoured structures, create craters on highways and runways by exploding. This type of charge also causes damage to military and industrial equipment and neutralises explosive devices and ammunition. As a rule, KZ-3 is not used to annihilate manpower.
The drones that were used to attack Moscow and the Moscow region were allegedly identified as UJ-22 Airborne UAVs.
This type of drone is three meters long. It is designed by Ukrainian company Ukrjet, which presented its UAV in 2021.
This type of drones has been used before to attack objects in Moscow suburbs.
However, according to unconfirmed reports, the drones that were used in the Moscow attack were of an unknown type. They were designed on the basis of the canard aerodynamic configuration — similar to the ones that Ukraine used to strike Krasnodar on May 26, Alexei Rogozin, the head of the Centre for the Development of Transport Technologies said.
According to him, such UAVs are powered by an internal combustion engine and have a wingspan of at least four meters. Their range may vary from 400 to 1,000 kilometres. The cost of such drones ranges from $30,000 to $200,000.
Electronic warfare equipment is generally useless against such drones, Rogozin said. The only way to counter them effectively is to shoot them down.
According to Dmitry Kornev, the founder of MilitaryRussia website, the drones that were used in the attack on Moscow were "practically handcrafted."
"The control wing is at the front, the propeller is in the rear part of the drone. Its design is adapted for long distance flights,” he said.
It was also reported that eyewitnesses mistakenly took a Cessna 172 aircraft for a Ukrainian drone. Such aircraft can be regularly seen over the Moscow Ring Road. This is a civilian aircraft that does not pose any danger.
Several drones attacked Moscow and the Moscow region on May 30 in the morning. The Russian Ministry of Defence said that Moscow was attacked by eight Ukrainian drones, all of them were shot down.