How Ukraine’s month-long drone assault has brought the war home for Russians

Damage in Moscow has left ordinary Russians asking difficult questions about the purpose of the conflict in Ukraine, as Arpan Rai reports

A Moscow resident points at a damaged building in the city’s business district after a drone attack on 23 August (EPA)

Volodymyr Zelensky waited 17 months to admit publicly what intelligence agencies had suspected for some time: that, having kept Vladimir Putin’s forces at bay, the time had come to give Moscow a small taste of its own medicine.

“Ukraine is getting stronger,” he announced earlier this summer. “Gradually, the war is returning to the territory of Russia – to its symbolic centres and military bases, and this is an inevitable, natural and absolutely fair process.”

What followed was a month unlike any other so far in this conflict, as Russia experienced at least 80 drone strikes peppering targets from the heart of Moscow to its border regions. Some of Putin’s most expensive war machines turned into mangled ruins in air raids that confirmed even military airbases hundreds of miles from Ukraine were not safe.