Baby and man dead in Russia after overnight Ukraine drone strikes

A six-month-old baby has died in Russia's Moscow region after debris from a drone struck a building, according to the regional governor. A man was also killed overnight in the Belgorod region in a separate drone attack, local authorities said. The incidents came during a large-scale overnight wave of Ukrainian drone strikes across Russia.

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Andrei Vorobyov, the governor of the Moscow region, said the baby was taken out of the building with another child and two other survivors before dying on the way to hospital. Russia's defence ministry said air defences intercepted and destroyed 419 Ukrainian fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles across the country overnight. Moscow's mayor, Sergey Sobyanin, said air defence forces shot down 50 drones headed for the capital.

The reported deaths add to the civilian toll from a conflict that has increasingly included long-range drone attacks. Kyiv has stepped up such strikes in recent months, particularly against energy infrastructure, which it says is a way to target a key source of revenue for Russia's war effort. The overnight barrage also came days after Russia said it had shot down 660 Ukrainian drones between Thursday and Friday, one of the highest figures reported since the start of the war.

The latest attacks underline how the drone campaign has become a central part of the conflict, with both sides seeking to disrupt military and economic targets far from the front line. For Russia, repeated drone incursions near Moscow and in border regions such as Belgorod have become a security and political concern. For Ukraine, the strikes are presented as a response to Russia's wider assault and a way to apply pressure on infrastructure linked to the war.

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The row also comes amid a continuing exchange of claims between Moscow and Kyiv over the scale and purpose of the strikes. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia had repeatedly delayed deadlines to capture the eastern Donbas region, while rejecting Moscow's account of the fighting. He also said fuel shortages in Russia were a direct consequence of the war and linked them to Ukrainian strikes on oil industry targets.

What remains unclear is the full extent of damage from the overnight attacks and whether there were further casualties beyond those already reported. It is also not yet clear how many of the drones reached their intended areas before being intercepted. The situation is likely to remain fluid as both sides continue long-range strikes and issue competing accounts of their impact.

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