A night over Moscow, counted by the mayor and by the departure boards

The drone warnings over the Moscow region began at about 22:00 local time on Wednesday, 20:00 in Berlin². From then on the mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, posted running totals on Telegram. Vedomosti counted 47 drones he said were destroyed during the evening, and 119 more after midnight by the time of its report; the first group of the night was announced at 00:09 Moscow time, 22:09 in Berlin¹. Ukrainian outlets tracking the same posts put the overall figure above 120³.

None of those numbers can be independently verified, as the Kyiv Post notes². They are claims by one side about its own success, and they rise in steps because that is how they are posted. Read them as a lower bound on the size of the raid, not as a measure of what got through.

What can be checked is the effect on ordinary traffic. Rosaviatsiya, the federal air transport agency, imposed temporary restrictions on arrivals and departures at Vnukovo, Domodedovo and Zhukovsky “to ensure flight safety”¹. Zhukovsky reopened about an hour later; the other two kept working under special coordination². Two flights from Turkey were turned back because of the Vnukovo restrictions, according to ASTRA, citing TASS and air-traffic data². Residents of Naro-Fominsk, about 56 km from the ring road, reported at least three explosions; there was no official explanation and no confirmed damage or casualties in the reports^2,3.

This is not new. On 23 October all four main Moscow airports suspended operations, disrupting hundreds of flights². The steady lesson is that the modern long-range raid is measured as much in schedules as in craters: diverted aircraft, missed connections, rebooked crews. Those costs show up in airline accounts and passenger complaints, which, unlike a mayor’s tally, someone eventually has to reconcile.