Moscow: According to the Russian defence ministry, three Ukrainian drones were shot down over Moscow early on Sunday in an attack that also temporarily closed an international airport and damaged two office towers.

Two of the drones "suppressed by electronic warfare" and crashed into an office complex, while one was shot down on the outskirts of the city. Nobody was hurt.

Prior to several drone attacks this year, Moscow and its surroundings, which are located about 500 kilometres (310 miles) from the Ukrainian border, had hardly ever been targeted during the conflict in Ukraine.

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The drone attack that was reported on Sunday is the most recent in a string of recent drone attacks that Moscow has attributed to Kyiv, including attacks on the Kremlin and Russian towns close to the Ukrainian border.

According to the defence ministry, it was a "attempted terrorist attack." It claimed on Telegram that an attempted terrorist attack by the Kiev regime using unmanned aerial vehicles against targets in the city of Moscow was stopped on the morning of July 30.

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"Air defence systems over the territory of the Odintsovo district of the Moscow region destroyed one Ukrainian UAV in the air.

Two more drones were neutralised by electronic warfare and crashed on the grounds of a non-residential building complex in Moscow-City after losing control.

A commercial area called Moscow-City is located in the western part of the city.
The city's mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, wrote on Telegram that "facades of two city office towers were slightly damaged."

The speaker continued, "No victims or injured."
In AFP photos, it was evident that several windows on the corner of the buildings had been blown out, leaving documents and mangled steel beams on the ground below.

The area had been cordoned off by police. The Vnukovo airport in the capital, according to the state news agency TASS, is "closed for departures and arrivals, flights are redirected to other airports."
Operations appeared to have stabilised in less than an hour.

The same airport, southwest of the city, experienced a brief disruption in air traffic earlier this month as a result of a series of drone attacks. The assaults on Moscow come a few weeks into a counteroffensive by Ukraine to reclaim territory lost to Russia since extensive hostilities erupted in February 2022.

Such attacks "would not be possible without the assistance given to the Kyiv regime by the US and its NATO allies," according to Russia's foreign ministry.

On Friday, Russia reported that it had shot down two missiles over the southern Rostov region, which borders Ukraine, inflicting at least 16 injuries as a result of debris landing in Taganrog.

Shortly after, it claimed to have shot down a second S-200 missile close to the city of Azov, with the missile's debris landing in a rural area.

Authorities on the other side of the border reported that a Russian strike on Saturday claimed the lives of two people in the southern city of Zaporizhzhia.

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According to the Ukrainian national police, at least one civilian was also killed and five others were hurt in a missile attack on the northeastern city of Sumy.

At around 8:00 p.m. (1700 GMT), an explosion reportedly caused the building to be destroyed, according to public broadcaster Suspilne. Early in July, a Russian drone attack struck an apartment complex in the same city, leaving 21 people injured and three dead.