Civilian flights at Moscow’s four main airports were suspended on October 23 during a reported Ukrainian drone raid, creating a fresh disruption to Russian air travel and underscoring the wider security consequences of long-range strikes in the war.
Russia’s civil aviation authority, Rosaviatsiya, announced restrictions on arriving and departing flights at Sheremetyevo, Domodedovo, Vnukovo and Zhukovsky at 2:05 p.m. local time, the Kyiv Independent reported. Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin said 17 drones had been shot down while heading toward the capital. The Kyiv Independent said FlightRadar24 recorded 85 cancellations and 229 delays at Sheremetyevo that day.
An all-clear was later reported at Sheremetyevo at 5 p.m. local time, according to Russia’s state news agency TASS. Photos that purportedly showed drone debris on the airport’s tarmac circulated on social media, but the Kyiv Independent said it could not independently verify them. Ukraine had not commented on the reported raid when the article was published.
The latest shutdown follows a pattern of temporary closures across Russia. DW reported, citing the independent outlet Agentstvo, that Moscow’s four airports had been forced to suspend operations almost daily during October, with some closures lasting up to nine hours.
The disruption also gives concrete effect to a warning issued by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in early September. He said airlines, insurers and users of major Russian airports should expect Russian airspace to become unsafe, and Ukraine subsequently sent a related warning to the International Civil Aviation Organization.
The sources do not establish that Moscow’s airspace has been permanently closed or that Ukraine has fully achieved that stated objective. They do establish repeated, temporary flight restrictions during reported drone activity, while the scale and operational impact of the latest raid remain partly dependent on Russian official accounts and flight-tracking data.