Jens Asbjørn Bøgen
Nearly 200 flights were canceled or delayed near Moscow and St. Petersburg alone.
Across one night, Ukrainian drones triggered a wave of ground stops that rolled from one Russian city to the next: Moscow, then the Volga region, then the Baltic coast. By sunrise on Friday, air traffic in a wide stretch of European Russia had been paused and rebooted at a scale operators have rarely managed in a single shift.
Russia’s aviation regulator restricted flights at all four Moscow hubs and St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo overnight on October 15-16, with nearly 200 flights delayed or canceled, independent Russian outlet Meduza reported.
The ground stop began in the Moscow area the evening before and spread outward through the night. Sheremetyevo logged 79 affected departures and arrivals, Vnukovo 66. Pulkovo saw 37 departing and nine arriving flights disrupted, with restrictions there lifted only around 9 a.m. local time.
Cumulative pressure on Moscow’s airports
The scale of this October stands out. Moscow’s four hubs recorded about 101 combined hours of closures between October 1 and 14 alone, compared with 46 hours across all of September, according to a tally by independent Russian outlet Agentstvo cited by Meduza. Friday’s overnight shutdown added several more hours on top of that.
The overnight rollout tracked the drone paths across the country. Industry outlet Aerotime, citing Russian media, reported that authorities ultimately restricted operations at 22 airports, with regional hubs in Tambov, Yaroslavl, Penza and Saratov among those grounded alongside the Moscow ring and Pulkovo.
Air defense counterclaims and other targets
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said on Telegram that air defenses had destroyed 94 Ukrainian drones heading toward the capital since the previous evening. Citing TASS, Aerotime reported that Russia’s Defense Ministry put the overnight total at 644 drones launched by Ukraine across its regions, 57 of them aimed at Moscow.
Beyond the airports, Ukrainian drones also struck a Yandex data center in Vladimir Oblast, roughly 500 kilometers from the Ukrainian border, and warehouses in Rostov Oblast, Kyiv Independent reported, citing Russian regional sources.
The same Vladimir data center had already been hit on October 11, part of a run of strikes on Yandex sites that also included Ryazan and Kaluga oblasts on October 8 and 9.
Ukraine has not publicly confirmed the full target list. Speaking in September, President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russian skies would become “de facto closed.”
