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Drones over Moscow disrupt air travel again
Summary
A retrospective on 1 August 2023, when drone incidents near the Russian capital closed an airport for the second time in two days and prompted an airline to reroute flights.
What did the drone incidents near Moscow on 1 August 2023 actually change? On that day, the visible effects were disruption to air travel and damage to a prominent office complex in the Russian capital.
Russia said it destroyed three drones near Moscow. One of them damaged the 21st floor of the IQ-quarter mixed-use complex, which hosts offices for the Ministry of Economic Development. Vnukovo International Airport temporarily closed, the second time in two days.
A repeated pattern
The closure followed a similar episode on 30 July 2023. Russia then said it had destroyed three Ukrainian drones over Moscow, that one person was injured, and that officials had closed Vnukovo to traffic. Two such incidents in quick succession meant that the airport's closures were no longer isolated.
Airlines adjust
The commercial consequences appeared the same day. Turkmenistan Airlines announced that it would temporarily suspend flights from Ashgabat to Moscow following the drone attacks. Its flights would instead go to Kazan, in Tatarstan. The decision showed that foreign carriers were responding to the risk to Moscow's airports.
The wider picture
The incidents came a day after a Russian ballistic missile strike on 31 July 2023 on an apartment complex and a university building in Kryvyi Rih, in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. At least six civilians were killed and 75 others injured. Russia's war was therefore being felt on both sides of the front line, though in very different ways: the Kryvyi Rih strike killed and wounded civilians, while the Moscow incidents caused one reported injury, damage to a building and travel disruption.
Anti-war sentiment also surfaced in the region. On 30 July 2023, activists protested in Belgrade, Serbia, after two prominent anti-war and anti-Putin activists had problems trying to enter the country.
The events of 1 August 2023 were limited in scale, but they showed how the war was reaching Moscow's airspace, its government-linked offices and the decisions of airlines serving the city.
