Dan Morrison and Tom Nagorski
The streets hadn’t been swept clean of the broken glass and twisted aluminum from Monday's drone strike on the IQ-Quarter skyscrapers in Moscow--when another missile came screaming out of the sky Tuesday, blasting a fresh hole in the facade of the office and residential tower complex.
It was the latest in a spate of drone attacks — 120 this year, according to one estimate — to strike inside Russian territory. The Ukrainian government made no claim of responsibility, but the Russian foreign ministry called it a Ukrainian “terrorist attack” and went so far as to compare the strike — which left no one killed or injured — with the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, which killed 2,996 people.
The 9/11 attacks “caused an enormous number of casualties,” foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova admitted. “But the methods,” she claimed, “were the same."
While most of the suddenly common drone strikes inside Russia are doing minimal damage, they have shattered the calm in Russia’s capital. Ever since President Vladimir Putin sent 150,000 troops into Ukraine 524 days ago, the Kremlin has taken pains to present a surreal, all-is-well narrative on the home front. Even now, the war in Ukraine remains “a special military operation”; it’s still a crime to call the conflict a “war”.
But with each blast from a Ukrainian flying munition, that sense of normalcy– already broken by the Wagner mercenary uprising in June–becomes more fragile.
"This is a disgusting situation when something flies into the capital and explodes,” Alexander, a resident of Moscow’s central business district who lives near the IQ-Quarter complex, told the BBC.
"No one is safe in this situation," he said. No one knows "what will hit us and where."
That sense of Russian insecurity is almost certainly what Ukraine is aiming for, having spent nearly all of those 524 days of war under some form of air raid warnings and suffered tens of thousands of civilian and military fatalities. For the Ukrainians, the drones offer a way to strike back and shake Russian complacency, and to do so without crossing a red line set by the U.S. and its NATO allies: don’t use our weapons against Russia.
“Moscow is rapidly getting used to a full-fledged war,” Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said on Twitter after Tuesday’s strike. He added that Russians could expect “more unidentified drones, more collapse, more civil conflicts, more war.”
Symbolic and strategic drone strikes
For now, the attacks on Moscow carry little more than symbolic weight, along with whatever fears they raise among the local population. But the vast majority of drone strikes against Russia to date have been aimed at high-value strategic targets in southern Russia and Russian-occupied Ukraine.
Of the more than 120 suspected Ukrainian drone attacks the BBC has cataloged this year, only a handful were carried out against Moscow.
The others were aimed at the infrastructure of Russia’s war: ammunition depots, oil refineries, rail lines and bridges. And those drones did their work closer to the Ukrainian border; a quick search of one Ukrainian news outlet, the Kyiv Independent, shows dozens of drone strikes in the southern Russian cities of Krasnodar, Rostov and Bryansk and in Russian-occupied Crimea.
That pattern continued late Tuesday in Crimea, as explosions were heard not far from a Russian naval base at Sebastopol. The Russian-installed governor, Mikhail Razvozhaev, reported that a drone had been shot down and exploded on impact.
Can drones change the game?
Despite Podolyak’s claim that a “full-fledged war” is coming to Russian territory, the impact of the drone strikes thus far is an open question.
"I feel worried, but I'm not scared," Igor, a Moscow resident, told Reuters after Tuesday’s blast in the capital. He said he was considering taking a measure that many Ukrainians would be familiar with - buying a protective film for his windows, "so that debris doesn't fly into my apartment".
Another Muscovite, Kirill, said he had seen much worse in his hometown. "I feel safe,” he said. “I'm originally from Donetsk (in Eastern Ukraine), so I consider this a minor incident.”
“I do not think that drone attacks somehow significantly affect the social climate and public opinion in Moscow,” said Igor Eidman, a Russian dissident based in Germany who once served as an advisor to liberal members of Russia’s parliament. “They don’t result in much; there is no panic or fear in Moscow.”
That said, Eidman also told The Messenger that “these attacks remind Muscovites of their vulnerability in the event of an escalation of hostilities. Perhaps these attacks increase the desire of ordinary Russians to end the war as soon as possible before it comes to their homes.”
Another analyst, Mathieu Boulègue, a consulting fellow at Chatham House who focuses on Russian foreign policy and military affairs, called the use of drones against Russia "mosquito warfare" - as in, more of an irritant than something likely to alter the course of the conflict. The strikes are a "psychological reminder" to the enemy, Boulègue told the BBC, that “their skies are not safe.”
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