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Moscow office tower hit again with drone, Ukraine hospital suffers deadly attack

Investigators are shown at a damaged office building in Moscow on Tuesday, the second time the area has come under attack in three days. (Evgenia Novozhenina/Reuters) A high-rise building in Moscow’s business district that houses three Russian government ministries was struck by a drone for the second time in three days on Tuesday, in what Russia called an attempted Ukrainian “terrorist attack.” The building that was struck is known as the “IQ quarter,” which houses the Ministry of Economic Development, the the Ministry of Digital Development and the Ministry of Industry and Trade. Video obtained by Reuters showed a section of its glass facade, high above the ground, had been destroyed by the impact. “At the moment, experts are assessing the damage and the state of the infrastructure for the safety of people in the building. This will take some time,” Darya Levchenko, an adviser to the economic development minister, said on the Telegram messaging service. She said staff were working by video-conference. Moscow has come under repeated drone attacks since early May, when two drones were fired at the roof of a building in the Kremlin complex. Emergency personnel work outside a damaged office block in the Moskva-Citi business district following a reported drone attack in Moscow on Tuesday, the second drone strike since Sunday. (Alexander Memenov/AFP/Getty Images) While the incidents have not caused casualties or major damage, they have provoked widespread unease amid the Kremlin’s narrative that Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine is proceeding according to plan. Ukraine hasn’t directly claimed responsibility for the attacks, although Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said Russia should expect “more unidentified drones, more collapse, more civil conflicts, more war.” “Moscow is rapidly getting used to a full-fledged war,” Podolyak wrote on X, the social media platform previously known as Twitter. In a statement, the Russian Defence Ministry said it had thwarted the “attempted terrorist attack” and downed two drones west of the Moscow city centre. It said another one was foiled by jamming equipment and went “out of control” before crashing into buildings in the Moskva-Citi business district. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said it hit the same tower that had been struck on Sunday. “The facade has been damaged on the 21st floor. Glazing was destroyed over 150 square metres,” he said. A witness told Reuters: “We were going to see the tower where the explosion happened the day before yesterday. Suddenly there was this explosion, and we immediately ran. There were shards of glass and then smoke rising. Then the security services starting running that way. The shards were really big.” Vnukovo airport, one of three major airports serving the capital, briefly shut down but later resumed full operations. After the first drone hit the business district on Sunday, tech company Yandex sent a memo to staff instructing them not to be in the office at night and urging them to “take care.” Many companies in Russia continue to allow employees to work in hybrid mode, split between home and the office, following the lockdowns imposed during the coronavirus pandemic. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday that Ukrainian attacks on Moscow and other targets inside Russia were “acts of desperation” and that Russia was taking all measures possible to protect against strikes. Kyiv typically does not claim responsibility for specific incidents on Russian territory, and it did not claim Sunday’s attack, though President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the war was “gradually returning to Russia’s territory — to its symbolic centres.” Two drones reached the Kremlin in May, the most high-profile incident, but other attacks have targeted buildings near the Defence Ministry’s headquarters on the Moscow River and the capital’s exclusive Rublyovka suburb, home to much of Russia’s political, business and cultural elite. Inside Ukraine on Tuesday, a doctor was killed and five medical workers were wounded in Russian shelling of a hospital in the southern city of Kherson, regional officials said. “Today at 11:10 a.m., the enemy launched another attack on the peaceful residents of our community,” military administration head Roman Mrochko wrote on Telegram. Photos posted by officials showed the bloodied floor of a balcony and a gaping hole in a roof with debris strewn over the floor. Regional governor Oleksandr Prokudin said four medical workers had been wounded, in addition to a badly wounded nurse whose injuries were reported earlier. Mrochko said the young doctor had only worked in his job for a few days and that doctors were fighting for the life of the nurse. The facility’s surgery department was also damaged in the shelling, Prokudin said. Medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières, also known as Doctors Without Borders, said it had been working at the hospital supplying medical equipment and providing mental health consultations to people displaced by the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam in June. “We unequivocally condemn this disgraceful attack on a medical facility and extend our condolences to the family of the doctor who died,” the group said in a social media post. In a separate incident in the northeastern village of Pershotravneve, an elderly woman was killed and a man was wounded in midday Russian shelling, Kharkiv regional governor Oleh Synehubov wrote on Telegram. Reuters could not immediately verify the details of the reports. Investigators examine a damaged skyscraper in the ‘Moscow City’ business district after a reported drone attack in Moscow early Sunday. (The Associated Press) Three Ukrainian drones attacked Moscow in the early hours on Sunday, Russian authorities said, injuring one person and prompting a temporary closure of traffic in and out of one of four airports around the Russian capital. It was the fourth such attempt at a strike on the capital region this month and the third this week, fuelling concerns about Moscow’s vulnerability to attacks as Russia’s war in Ukraine drags into its 18th month. The Russian Defence Ministry referred to the incident as an “attempted terrorist attack by the Kyiv regime” and said three drones targeted the city. One was shot down in the surrounding Moscow region by air defence systems and two others were jammed. Those two crashed

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“NATO’s latest moves could bottle up much of Russia’s naval power”

A Russian nuclear submarine sails off to take part in Pacific Fleet drills near Vladivostok, Russia on April 14, 2023. (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP) Since midnight Wednesday, Moscow time, Russia has been warning the world that any ship approaching a Ukrainian port “will be regarded as potential carriers of military cargo.” This obvious threat to sink commercial shipping appears to be an attempt to prevent ships from taking on Ukrainian grain. This week, Russia unilaterally ended talks on renewing the Black Sea Grain Initiative that has allowed food to flow to other countries from Ukraine, despite the war. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has asked Turkey to join him in a new arrangement to protect grain ships without Russia’s involvement. Turkey has yet to respond. The threat to sink commercial shipping marks an escalation that can only be carried out under a state of declared war, said Tanya Grodzinski, a naval historian at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ont. That’s something Russian President Vladimir Putin has been anxious to avoid, opting instead to present his war on Ukraine as a “special military operation.” The new threat may say more about Russia’s weakness than its strength, as the strategic balance in the waters around European Russia shifts against it. The day the NATO summit in Vilnius opened — July 11 — was marked in Cuba by the arrival of the Russian Navy warship Perekop of the Baltic Fleet. The Cuban government welcomed the Perekop — the biggest Russian warship to visit Cuba in many years — with a cannon salute from Havana’s old fort. For Moscow, the visit allowed Russia to project its military power into the Americas and show support for the Cuban Communist Party, a close ally, on the second anniversary of a popular revolt against its rule. But as the fanfare unfolded in Havana, events in Vilnius that morning and the night before were building a new fence around the Perekop’s home ports of St Petersburg and Kaliningrad. Russia’s Baltic fleet will still be able to sail in peacetime but it’s being strategically bottled up as its home sea becomes a NATO lake. And to the south, Russia’s storied Black Sea fleet, already hurt by the humiliating loss of its flagship Moskva, faces an uncertain future and the possible loss of both its bases and its naval supremacy. One way in, one way out The Baltic and the Black Sea share a geographical feature: they both have only one slender opening into the world’s oceans. In the Baltic, three narrow straits separate Denmark from Sweden; the widest, between two Danish islands, is a mere 16 kilometres across. Ships seeking to exit the Black Sea to enter the Mediterranean must sail the Bosphorus River and the Dardanelles Strait — both of which are entirely within the territorial waters of NATO member Turkey. Four days after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Turkey closed the straits to all warships, a move that principally affects Russia. A Russian navy vessel launches an anti-ship missile test in the Peter The Great Gulf in the Sea of Japan on March 28, 2023. (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP) For those reasons, Russia has long preferred to station the main part of its blue water navy and its nuclear submarines at its Arctic and Pacific ports. Grodzinski said the Baltic and Black Sea fleets were central to Russia’s emergence as a great power after the 1790s. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and NATO’s response to it, threatens that standing, she added. “If this was viewed as a gamble on the part of Mr. Putin to recreate this image he has of Russia, this historic image of Russian being a great power, it’s being thwarted diplomatically in the Baltic and militarily in Ukraine and the Black Sea,” she told CBC News. “The implications for his leadership and position could be quite significant.” Putin and his defenders have claimed he launched his war to keep NATO away from Russia’s borders. Instead, the conflict triggered a new round of NATO expansion that this year caused Russia’s border with the alliance to more than double in length. The accession of Finland in April added more than 1,300 kilometres of NATO-Russia border. The green light for Sweden to join the alliance, which came on the eve of the Vilnius summit, turns the Baltic Sea into NATO’s backyard. At the start of the year, the northern shores of the Baltic, including both sides of the Gulf of Bothnia, were neutral territory. Sweden and Finland, two countries that maintain highly professional navies and air forces, had for decades remained outside of the European alliance. Now, every inch of Baltic shoreline outside of Russian waters is controlled by NATO allies — allies that are increasingly well-armed. “You’re seeing this rejuvenation of naval forces all across Europe,” said Grodzinski. “Sweden, Norway, Finland and so forth are expanding their navies. There is a greater NATO presence in in the Baltic Sea, which never really occurred before. So there’s a completely different dynamic.” Swedish Black Hawk helicopters fly past the Navy ship that U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin travels on during a military demonstration through the islands in the southern Stockholm archipelago on Wednesday, April 19, 2023. (Lolita Baldor/Associated Press) The Swedes, said retired Canadian admiral Mark Norman, “have an incredibly capable military with some very advanced technologies, many of which are homegrown or organic capabilities. They are experts in what I would call sea control in relatively shallow waters. “They’re experts in mining, counter-mining. They are experts in submarining and in anti-submarining. These are vital capabilities.” A Russian ship leaving Saint Petersburg must first sail through the Gulf of Finland, where only about 80 kilometres of open water separate Helsinki from the Estonian capital Tallinn. NATO is now on both sides of that narrow strait. The even narrower corridor of international waters in the middle is within easy range of NATO’s sea-skimming missiles from either shore. The new political geography of the region means “in effect, in any form of conflict, the Baltic gets cut off,” said maritime and arctic security expert Rob Huebert of the University of Calgary. “We’re not going to be able to see any