2024-09-19 16:27:29
On September 10, Kyiv carried out a massive drone strike on Russian territory. Air defense was supposed to destroy around 140 Ukrainian drones that were attacking nine Russian regions at night. One of them hit a building in the Ramenskoye region of Moscow. A journalist from the independent server Bereg went to the place affected by the military operation.
Ukraine decided to strike Russia at a time when reports began to appear in the media that Kiev could receive permission to use Western long-range missiles to strike deep into Russian territory.
Apparently, the region of the aforementioned Moscow suburb of Ramenskoye suffered the greatest impact, where drone strikes damaged three apartment buildings and injured three civilians. One person died in the impact. Ramenskoye is located about 30 kilometers southeast of Moscow.
In order to find out how the locals cope with the offensive of the Ukrainian army, the correspondent of the independent journalist group Bereg went to the affected area. His report in an English translation was published by the Meduza server.
At first glance, a normal day in the suburbs
“On the balcony of one of the houses stands an old man without a shirt, smoking a cigarette and looking into the distance. Across the street stands a pale blue building that was hit by Ukrainian drones. There are cracked holes where the windows used to be. The frames of the balconies are partially melted and the facade is crumbling “The ruined building cannot be overlooked, but the man seems to be deliberately looking away,” the article says.
In the vicinity of the damaged apartment complex there is a railway station, a market, a cultural center, a stadium and several schools – in short, the city “lives”. It is no different even a few days after the Ukrainian attack. Elderly sellers stand on the street and offer all kinds of goods to passers-by. Children and teenagers race around on electric scooters and mothers with prams stroll through the neighborhood. “However, as soon as you enter the courtyard of the blue apartment building, the atmosphere changes,” the reporter describes.
“Now it’s a reflex. A train passes and I wince!” complains a young woman in a plaid shirt to her friend. “They say the drone pilot didn’t notice our building – otherwise he would have hit us!” the man declares during a conversation with his neighbors. “I thought to myself: ‘An explosion! It probably killed someone. I’ll find out in the morning,'” the young man in a suit tells the woman walking next to him.
Photo: Reuters, Anadolu Agency
The attack happened around four in the morning. But some of the residents of the suburbs were already awake long ago. They were unable to sleep because of the sound, which they described as “continuous buzzing”. Locals registered it for the first time around two o’clock. “To be honest, I didn’t expect the bullets to reach us,” a woman named Polina confides to the journalist.
Her house remained unaffected. When the sound of the exploding drone stopped, she breathed a sigh of relief. “I said to myself, thank God it didn’t hit us. And then suddenly my cell phone rings,” she says. Polina’s dejected sister, who lives with her family in a pale blue house, answered the phone. She was fine and, like her apartment, nothing happened to her or her loved ones. However, the first rescuers who arrived at the scene expelled them from the house for several hours.
“My husband, who is part of a ‘special military operation’ (the Kremlin-instructed term used by the Russians as part of their propaganda to describe the aggression in Ukraine) was shocked and said: ‘How could we have allowed this?'” adds Polija’s friend Ludmila. “He even joked that he would come here himself and shoot those drones down with a rifle – Russian-style air defense!”
They could have warned us, they didn’t bother
Both friends believe that the drones were controlled by Ukrainian soldiers “from somewhere nearby”. The city is surrounded by dense forests, in which the pilots could be hiding, according to the pair. “Furthermore, the women were convinced that the Russian authorities must have known about the planned attack,” Bereg writes in the report.
“They closed the airport at one in the morning. That means they knew it, but they didn’t bother to warn us,” Ludmila points out. Polina immediately moderates her statement. “Maybe they just didn’t want to cause panic. “Maybe. But on the other hand, people could leave the windows, pack the most necessary things and leave. Maybe then no one would die,” Ludmila says.
The woman who died in the attack was lying in bed at the time of the attack. The drone flew into her apartment through a window before exploding and tearing off a piece of wall, fatally injuring her in the head.
Both Polina and Ludmila hope that it was an isolated case. Still, they think the city needs to put in place a proper warning system for possible future attacks – otherwise, they say, “they don’t have to wake up next time.”
The lights suddenly turn on in the upper floors of the blue building. Residents in the courtyard look up in surprise and whisper whether it is safe to return to the partially destroyed apartments and use the electricity there.
“Those poor people need help. Many of them haven’t even paid off their mortgage yet,” says Ekaterina, pointing towards the shining windows. The building is also her home, and she still pays off her apartment there. However, unlike some of her neighbors, she escaped unscathed. “My apartment is fine, I’m worried about others who weren’t so lucky. I’m afraid the insurance company won’t pay for the damage caused by the drone attack. We had such a beautiful building. And now the kids will have to look at this,” he sighs.
Ukrainians are giving Russia even more significant blows than the Kursk battle, Procházková claims (article with video here)
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