Zelensky confirms 'fully justified' Ukrainian drone strikes on Moscow region as Russia says it shot down 556 drones overnight

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed overnight drone strikes on the Moscow region as "völlig gerechtfertigt," saying long-range Ukrainian drones had reached targets 500 kilometres from Ukraine's border. Russia's defence ministry, via TASS, said it had intercepted 556 Ukrainian drones across the country overnight, without disclosing how many had hit home. Moscow's mayor Sergei Sobyanin reported at least 12 injured in the capital — most of them workers near an oil refinery — and several damaged houses; the capital's airports briefly halted takeoffs and landings on drone alerts. Moscow-region Governor Andrei Vorobyov said at least three people had been killed and that homes and apartments had burned. Damage was also reported from Sevastopol on the Russian-occupied Crimea. "Die Konzentration der russischen Luftabwehr in der Region Moskau ist am größten. Aber wir überwinden sie," Zelensky said on Telegram, releasing video footage of a smoke plume on the horizon. "We tell the Russians clearly: your state must end this war."

Russia answered with a drone-and-missile strike package on central and southern Ukraine that wounded at least 12 people, regional officials said. In Odesa, a residential building was hit and an 11-year-old boy and a 59-year-old man were among the injured; a university lecture hall and a kindergarten were also damaged, the head of the local military administration Serhij Lyssak said on Telegram. In Dnipro, the head of the Dnipropetrovsk regional military administration Oleksandr Hanscha said nine were wounded including a child after the roof of a 24-storey residential block caught fire and a pyrotechnics warehouse was hit, sparking multiple fires across the city. The Belgorod regional crisis centre, on the Russian side, separately said a Ukrainian drone had struck a 10-storey residential block, wounding nine, including a three-year-old girl. The exchange is the largest by drone count since the May 12 combined assault that killed at least six in Ukraine.

Around the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, the situation hardened. Alexei Likhachev, the head of Rosatom, told Russian media "wir nähern uns immer mehr einem Punkt, ab dem es kein Zurück mehr gibt," citing repeated artillery and drone activity around the six-reactor, 6,000-megawatt complex that has been under Russian control since March 2022 and is producing no electricity. He said the site held some 2,600 tonnes of nuclear material and that "im Falle eines gezielten Treffers, insbesondere in Lagern für Kernbrennstoff" the risks would be regional. Plant management said Ukrainian artillery had hit a vehicle hall and buses without injuries, and that an inbound Ukrainian drone had been shot down by air defence; an IAEA monitoring team remains permanently on site.

Former German chancellor Angela Merkel publicly broke with Europe's current posture at the Republica conference, telling WDR that the continent was not deploying its diplomatic potential. "Diplomatie war immer die zweite Seite der Medaille, auch im Kalten Krieg," she said, calling it "nicht ausreichend" that US President Donald Trump alone was keeping a line open to Moscow. She urged Europeans to build a common position: "Putin zu unterschätzen, wäre ein Fehler, auch jetzt. Und uns nichts zuzutrauen, wäre genauso ein Fehler."

A Ukrainian drone packed with explosives crashed near the town of Utena in north-east Lithuania, close to the Latvian border and to Russian ally Belarus, Lithuanian authorities said. Special forces defused the device at the field crash site; Vilmantas Vitkauskas, head of Lithuania's national crisis-management centre, said the drone was "sehr wahrscheinlich" Ukrainian. No injuries were reported.

Two parallel tracks moved alongside the strikes. Ukraine received the remains of 528 fallen soldiers from Russia via the International Committee of the Red Cross, a day after a 1,000-prisoner exchange that grew out of the May 9–11 ceasefire Trump brokered around the Russian Victory Day parade. And the Kremlin announced Vladimir Putin will travel to Beijing on Tuesday for a two-day visit with Xi Jinping to strengthen the "umfassende Partnerschaft" — days after Trump's own state visit to China. Russia's Federal Statistics Service Rosstat said the economy shrank 0.2 percent in the first quarter, the first quarterly contraction in three years, against 1.4 percent growth a year earlier; the government has cut its 2026 GDP forecast from 1.3 percent to 0.4 percent.

Zelensky framed the night's wave as part of his sustained campaign against Russia's energy backbone, saying Ukrainian forces would continue striking Russian oil facilities and citing a hit on the Ryazan refinery as retaliation for an earlier Russian strike on Kyiv that killed 24. He also used his evening video address to press the West on sanctions enforcement, saying the missiles used in that Kyiv attack "haben die Russen Raketen eingesetzt, die in diesem Jahr hergestellt wurden," produced with electronics from European, Japanese and US companies routed through third countries. Russia's defence ministry, meanwhile, reported that Russian troops had taken the villages of Borova and Kutkivka in Ukraine's Kharkiv region.