Rosaviatsiya restricted flights arriving at and departing from Moscow’s Sheremetyevo, Vnukovo, Domodedovo, and Zhukovsky airports starting the evening of October 15.
The restrictions remained in place until early morning on October 16. Almost 160 flights were delayed or canceled, most of them at Vnukovo and Sheremetyevo: 66 and 79, respectively, the Moskva news agency reported.
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said air defense forces shot down 94 Ukrainian drones heading toward the Russian capital since the evening.
St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Airport was also closed, with restrictions lasting until 9 a.m. The St. Petersburg-based news outlet Fontanka reported that 37 departing flights and nine arriving flights were canceled or delayed. Four drones were shot down over the region, according to Leningrad region Governor Alexander Drozdenko.
The Atlantic journalist Simon Shuster wrote the day before, citing sources, that Ukraine’s campaign to paralyze operations at Russian airports is ”just getting started.” On September 1, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Russian skies are “becoming unsafe,” because “drones will start appearing in Russia’s skies in a way that will have to be reckoned with.” According to Shuster, Ukraine has used long-range drones in recent weeks to make the airspace around Russian airports harder to use. Zelensky, however, has not yet approved implementation of the original plan, which called for much more aggressive tactics.
Moscow’s airports suspended operations increasingly often in October. The independent Russian investigative outlet Agentstvo calculated that the four airports were closed for a combined 101 hours during the first 14 days of the month, compared with just 46 hours for all of September.
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