629 Drones for Election Day: The Biggest Drone Attack on Moscow Opens Russia's Duma Vote

Russia opened the polls for its first State Duma election of the full-scale war on Friday morning, and Ukraine opened the sky. Overnight into September 18, Russia's Defense Ministry claimed it intercepted 629 Ukrainian drones across 14 regions and the waters of two seas, per figures carried by The Moscow Times and UA.NEWS. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin counted more than 350 of them bearing down on the capital region alone. By the Kremlin's own numbers, this was the biggest drone attack on Moscow of the entire war, and it arrived at the exact hour 111 million Russians were being invited to ratify that war at the ballot box.

The channel has tracked Ukraine's deep-strike campaign night by night for months. What happened this week is different in kind: two consecutive nights of long-range work, sequenced to bracket the opening of the Kremlin's most important political ritual since 2021.

The Biggest Drone Attack on Moscow, by Moscow's Own Count

"Between 8:00 p.m. on September 17 and 7:00 a.m. on September 18, more than 350 UAVs were flying toward the Moscow region," Sobyanin reported, adding that most were destroyed at a distance and 64 were shot down on the approach to the city itself. Debris and impact reports came in from Podolsk, Ramenskoye, Domodedovo, Istra and Kolomna, per UA.NEWS, which also cited reports of drones reaching industrial sites as far out as Togliatti and Taganrog.

For scale: the previous record push at the capital, on June 18 of this year, involved just over 190 drones claimed downed over the Moscow area, shut all four major airports, and killed 527 flights in a day, per BBC Russian service figures carried by Ukrinform. Friday's wave was nearly double that count toward the region, and the Defense Ministry's nationwide claim of 629 in a single night is among the largest it has ever published.

Intercept claims from the Russian MoD are propaganda-adjacent arithmetic and we treat them accordingly. But they set a floor on scale: Moscow does not invent 629 incoming drones on the morning it wants to project electoral normalcy.

The Night Before: Six Aircraft at Rostov and a Top-Five Refinery Burning

Photo: ArmyInform, CC BY 4.0

The election-eve wave followed a night of precision work. Overnight September 16 to 17, drones of the SBU's Alpha special operations center hit Rostov-Tsentralny airfield in Rostov-on-Don. President Zelensky confirmed the tally: one An-12 and two An-26 military transport aircraft plus three helicopters, with the SBU reporting a large-scale fire and secondary detonations in the aircraft parking area, per ArmyInform, Kyiv Post and Defense Express. "I thank our warriors who make the war tangible for Russia every day," Zelensky said. "Russia must choose peace."

Photo: An-26 transport aircraft, ArmyInform, CC BY 4.0

The same night, the 1st Separate Center of the Unmanned Systems Forces and the 414th Madyar's Birds brigade reached the Slavneft-YANOS refinery in Yaroslavl, one of Russia's five largest at roughly 15 million tons a year, more than 700 km from the border. Ukraine's General Staff confirmed a fire at the plant's AVT-3 primary distillation unit, per ArmyInform; Kyiv Post counts at least nine strikes on the facility in 2026. Governor Mikhail Yevraev confirmed damage and fires that took until after 8 a.m. to put out, and falling debris in Rostov-on-Don knocked out a transformer substation, cutting power to four districts of the city.

ISW's September 17 assessment frames the Rostov strikes as part of a deliberate SEAD/DEAD campaign in the oblast, and the Kyiv Independent reported two S-400 launchers destroyed in Bryansk Oblast in the same window. Suppressing air defenses in the south while saturating the capital's defenses from the west is not a coincidence of timing. It is a campaign.

A Vote With the Windows Blown Out

The election itself runs Friday through Sunday, closing at 18:00 GMT on September 20: all 450 Duma seats, half by party list, half by single-member district, plus 11 governorships and 39 regional legislatures, with voting extended into the occupied Ukrainian territories Russia claims to have annexed.

Photo: Dmitry Ivanov, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

The war reached the polling stations within hours. Central Election Commission chief Ella Pamfilova admitted a station in Krasnodar region had to be relocated after drone damage blew out its windows. More than 240 polling stations in Sochi sent voters and staff to shelters during air raid alerts, 14 stations in occupied Luhansk lost power to strikes on energy infrastructure, and The Moscow Times reported a CEC member killed in a drone strike in occupied Zaporizhzhia, alongside cyberattacks on Russia's remote electronic voting system and voting terminal failures in Moscow itself.

On the ballot: ten registered parties, every one of them pro-war. Yabloko, the only genuinely antiwar party, was struck from the party lists by the Supreme Court in August on grounds the Kyiv Independent describes as pretextual. Polls put United Russia, whose list is fronted by Sergey Lavrov and Sobyanin himself, anywhere from 31.8 to 49 percent, one analyst told the Kyiv Independent the vote "will be brazenly and ruthlessly falsified," and researchers cited by the same outlet estimate the 2024 presidential election carried 22 to 40 million fraudulent votes. As analyst Alexander Bratersky put it to Al Jazeera, elections remain "the only legal way to show disrespect for the Kremlin."

Russia's Answer, and the Cost of the Split Screen

Moscow's overnight reply ran on the usual axis. ISW logged 157 drones and 10 Banderol and Dan-T loitering munitions plus missiles against Ukraine overnight into September 17; a strike on a Zhytomyr business killed two, and a drone attack injured five people, three of them children, in Kyiv region, per The Moscow Times and Al Jazeera. Russia also hit logistics infrastructure near Odesa and a cargo vessel in Chornomorsk port, a day after a Russian drone killed the captain of a Tanzania-flagged civilian ship headed for a Ukrainian port, per the Kyiv Independent.

None of that changes the picture the Kremlin woke up to: a three-day plebiscite on the war, opening under air alert in Sochi, blackouts in occupied Luhansk, and the largest drone wave the capital region has ever recorded.

Why It Matters, and What to Watch

The Duma vote was built to be a demonstration of control, the first legislative election since the invasion and a loyalty audit for the war economy. Ukraine just converted it into a demonstration of reach. Every intercept claim Moscow publishes to reassure voters is also an admission of how much ordnance now crosses the border nightly, and every sheltered polling station undercuts the story that the war is somewhere else.

Watch three things through Sunday. First, the turnout and United Russia numbers against that 31.8 to 49 percent polling spread: the gap between reported and plausible will measure how much legitimacy the Kremlin feels it needs to manufacture. Second, whether the strike tempo holds through voting days two and three; Zelensky has already teased "good results in the Black Sea" with details pending. Third, the post-election lever: analysts cited by the Kyiv Independent still rate a new mobilization wave unlikely, but expect contract-signing pressure to climb once the ballots are counted.

The channel will be watching the tallies, both kinds, as they come in. For the live feed as it happens, it is t.me/TheLeaflet, and the morning read is right here at The Daily Sitrep.

Read next: The Graham Sanctions Bill Passes: 100 Percent Tariffs on Russia's Oil Buyers Are Now One Signature Away and Closing the Sky: Zelensky Puts Russian Aviation on Notice, and the Numbers Say He Can.

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Sources

Reporting and figures drawn from The Moscow Times, Al Jazeera, the Kyiv Independent, Kyiv Post, ArmyInform, UNN, Ukrinform, UA.NEWS, Defense Express and the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), with Russian Defense Ministry and Moscow city claims attributed as such.