Black smoke from a burning oil refinery filled the Moscow sky. The city’s four airports were urgently closed. And part of the busy highway that rings the Russian capital, a metropolis of 13 million people, was shut down.

As Ukraine escalated its effort to bring the war home for Russians, the strikes on Thursday appeared to be the largest drone attack on the Russian capital since President Vladimir V. Putin launched the war more than four years ago.

No deaths were immediately reported. But the large-scale assault seemed likely to feed fears among Russians that the Kremlin’s ability to isolate society from the impacts of the war was sharply eroding. That would usher in a new stage for a conflict that has now run longer than World War I.

For days, lines have formed and rationing has been implemented at gas stations in dozens of Russian regions, as persistent Ukrainian drone attacks on oil refineries and processing facilities have threatened a fuel shortage.

Ukraine has taken particular aim at Crimea, the peninsula that Russia illegally annexed in 2014, with a range of strikes aimed at cutting off the region’s supply lines. The Russian economy has also begun suffering from the costs of the war in a way that the Kremlin had managed to avoid for years.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, in a voice memo shared with journalists on Thursday, warned, “If Ukraine burns, then your Moscow will burn as well.”

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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/18/world/europe/moscow-ukraine-drone-attack-fire.html