Russian officials said Ukraine attacked Moscow before dawn on Tuesday with its largest long-range drone bombardment of the war, as both sides stepped up attacks ahead of talks intended to find a way to end three years of fighting.
The Russian Ministry of Defense claimed to have shot down at least 91 drones in the region around Moscow and more than 240 drones directed at other targets across the country.
The Ukrainian military said it had targeted Moscow’s oil refinery, which provides more than a third of the fuel consumed in the capital region, along with an oil production station in the Orel region. Neither claim could be independently verified.
Moscow’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, called the attack was the largest against the city since the start of the war. At least three people were killed and 18 others were injured in the broader Moscow region, the Russian authorities said, and four international airports temporarily suspended operations. Railway tracks near the Domodedovo airport south of Moscow were also damaged.
President Vladimir V. Putin was briefed on the attack, according to Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman. Mr. Peskov said Russian air defenses were doing “a great job” but told reporters that the authorities “must remain on guard” because attacks would likely continue.
The predawn strikes — just hours before high-level delegations from Kyiv and the United States were scheduled to meet in Saudi Arabia to discuss a possible path toward ending the war — appeared intended to serve as a reminder that despite suffering attacks and enduring huge losses, Ukraine can still hit back at Russia.
Ukraine has proposed an immediate truce in the air, saying it would immediately stop long-range strikes into Russia if Moscow agreed to an equivalent halt. That plan, supported by European nations, including France, is envisioned as a first step in building trust ahead of talks about the overall conflict, in which over a million Ukrainian and Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded.
Ukrainian officials are expected to raise it again in meetings on Tuesday with U.S. officials in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. In addition to a partial truce in the air, Ukraine was also expected to press the case for a halt to strikes on the Black Sea to gauge whether Moscow was willing to take any steps to end the fighting.
When asked on Tuesday whether Moscow would agree to such a plan, Mr. Peskov said it was “impossible to talk about positions now” and that Russia expected the American side to inform Moscow about the results of talks with Ukraine.
Kyiv has long maintained that the only way to force Russia to accept an enduring peace deal is through force and by raising the cost of the war for the Kremlin. In recent months, Ukraine has stepped up its attacks on critical infrastructure inside Russia, targeting oil and gas facilities that help fund the Russian war effort.
The timing of the overnight attack on Moscow was meant to drive home that message, according to Andriy Kovalenko, a senior Ukrainian official focused on Russian disinformation operations.
“This is an additional signal to Putin that he should also be interested in a cease-fire from the air,” he said in a statement. “Not only the oil refinery, drones can fly en masse over Moscow.”
President Volodymyr Zelensky has said that Ukraine plans to produce 30,000 long-range strike drones and 3,000 long-range missiles this year, building its domestic arms-making abilities even as U.S. military assistance remains suspended.
Russia has maintained its relentless bombardment of Ukrainian civilian and military institutions. Nearly every night in recent weeks, Russia has launched over 100 drones at targets across Ukraine, including at Kyiv, the capital.
The assaults — which frequently include a combination of ballistic and cruise missiles in an effort to saturate Ukrainian air defenses — persisted overnight Monday and into Tuesday.
Explosions echoed across Kyiv around midnight as air defense teams scrambled. On Tuesday morning, Ukraine’s air force said that Russia had launched 126 drones and one ballistic missile, adding that it shot down or disabled most of the drones as well as the missile.
At least one person was killed when a Russian drone struck a warehouse in Kharkiv and at least 17 others were injured in other attacks across the country, the Ukrainian authorities said. Drones hit the port city of Odesa in southern Ukraine, with the local authorities reporting fires in multiple locations.
Since President Trump spoke by telephone with President Vladimir V. Putin on Feb. 12 — the first official contact between the heads of state for the United States and Russia in years — more than 100 civilians have been killed in Russian strikes, according to data compiled by The New York Times based on reports from the Ukrainian authorities.
The intensifying strikes have been accompanied by shifting dynamics on the front lines, with Russian force retaking a large part of the territory in Russia’s Kursk region that had been occupied by Ukrainian forces. In a statement on Tuesday, the Russian defense ministry said that its forces had retaken more than 35 square miles of land in the Kursk region. That claim could not be independently verified.
Kyiv had hoped to use its control of that portion of land as leverage in any negotiations to end the war, but the recent developments may have changed that calculus, because the cost of holding the territory could outweigh any diplomatic gain.
More than 125 Ukrainian drones targeted the Kursk region overnight, according to Russia’s defense ministry. That came after the top Ukrainian military commander, Oleksandr Syrsky, said on Monday night that Kyiv was dispatching reinforcements to Kursk — but rejected Russian claims that a large contingent of Ukrainian soldiers there were at risk of encirclement.
“A decision was made to reinforce our group with the necessary forces and resources, including electronic warfare and drones,” he said.
At the same time, there are signs that the Russian offensive in eastern Ukraine has stalled. Russian forces have not advanced in over a week and Ukrainian forces have engaged in limited counterattacks to regain small patches of land, according to Ukrainian soldiers and military analysts who use combat footage to track the daily movements along the front.
