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By Ellie Cook and John Feng
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A new map has quietly appeared on the official website for Lyuberetsky, one of 36 districts bracketing Russia's capital city, Moscow.
On the map, there are dozens of sites earmarked as bomb shelters, so residents just east of Moscow's main metropolitan area know where to run when Ukrainian drones loom and test the air defenses dotted around the capital.
It's the latest sign of how Ukraine's intensified attacks on Moscow are being felt in the Kremlin, as Kyiv launches an increasing number of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) laden with explosives hundreds of miles into Russian soil and toward the seat of Russian President Vladimir Putin's power.
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Ukraine has carried out 237 drone strikes on Moscow, on top of another 85 on the broader region, since January 2026, according to statistics from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) nonprofit.
These attacks, numbering 322, already surpass the total tally of strikes Kyiv launched on Moscow and the surrounding areas for the entirety of 2025, a 12-month period when Ukraine targeted Moscow and the Moscow region on 287 occasions, ACLED data showed.
Kyiv hopes to cut off Russia from vital sources of revenue, like its fuel exports, and also to hammer home the impact of the war to Russian residents as far removed from the Ukrainian front lines as Moscow, and foment opposition to the conflict.
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Ukraine has homed in on logistics hubs, oil depots, military bases and warehouses used by Russia's largest online retailer, Wildberries, with evermore sophisticated and constantly upgraded drones.
But they've also managed to keep the pressure on Russia's bloated economy, fuel shortages coming hand-in-hand with inflation and cuts to social services—all of which is making the prospect of carrying on the war less and less popular in the country, according to recent polls, and will strengthen Ukraine's negotiating position when talks resume.
"These strikes are a deliberate effort to raise the economic and political cost of the war," Natia Seskuria, a senior research fellow with the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think tank in London, told Newsweek.
"If Kyiv is able to maintain or increase the pressure, this will pose inflict a significant economic and reputational damage to Russia," Seskuria said.
The ACLED data, which is accurate to July 27, sometimes characterizes a strike event as involving multiple drones or missiles at the same time. In 2023, Ukraine carried out 106 attacks on Moscow and the surrounding region, dipping to 67 throughout 2024.
The count for 2026 doesn't include Kyiv's most recent targeting of Moscow, when Russian authorities said nearly 400 drones flew toward the region overnight into July 28.
A drone struck an apartment building in the town of Chekhov, south of the city, while another careened into an open area and sparked a fire, according to Moscow Regional Governor Andrey Vorobyov.
Several residential buildings were damaged in towns surrounding Moscow, officials said, and a fire broke out at an oil depot south of the city, Russian independent media reported.
Most of the drones were shot down far away from the capital, Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin said, but 81 drones were destroyed close to Moscow.
A 'Game-Changer'
In mid-June, Ukrainian drones hit an oil refinery in southeastern Moscow, sparking a major fire that caused residents to complain of "oil rain." Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda described the attack at the time as a "game-changer" and said it brought the nearly four-and-a-half years of war back home to the Russian population.
This is precisely Ukraine's objective.
"When our deep strikes were not reaching Moscow and St. Petersburg, Putin did not think much about it," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in early July.
"Where do the Russian elites live? Moscow and St. Petersburg—the two major cities," he added. "Those places will be reached, because that is where they make the decisions to kill us."
St. Petersburg, Russia's second city and its former imperial capital, was targeted by Ukraine five times in 2025, according to ACLED. So far in 2026, however, more than four times this number of attacks on St. Petersburg have already been logged.
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"Putin’s goal from the very beginning of the full-scale war was to confine military operation within the territory of Ukraine," Oleksandr Merezhko, a member of Zelensky's Servant of the People party who chairs the parliamentary foreign affairs committee, told Newsweek.
"Strikes against Moscow are tremendously embarrassing to him because it shows that he is not in control and is incapable to guarantee security in the capital of Russia," Merezhko said. "We need to double down on such strikes."
As Ukraine's defense industry has boomed, the country's military has regularly boasted of longer-range drone strikes, often involving hundreds of UAVs launching in a single night.
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Ukrainian factories are now able to pump out high numbers of drones, fitted with more accurate guidance systems, which gives Kyiv the equipment to menace Moscow, said Ukrainian MP Oleg Dunda.
But Ukraine is also contending with Russia's own strike campaign. The Kremlin has frequently launched barrages of ballistic missiles at the country's major cities, while Ukraine struggles to source the scarce, expensive interceptor missiles needed to knock out these advanced, fast-traveling weapons before they slam into population centers.
Russia struck a drone-making factory in southwestern Kyiv in late July, Russian state media reported. It later emerged that the facility destroyed in the ballistic missile attack was owned by a U.S.-registered defense company.
The company made precision "deep-strike" drones, according to The Guardian. This term refers to hitting targets far beyond the frontlines of a conflict.
"We have developed our military capabilities and have increased a range of our strikes considerably, and these strikes create a powerful impetus to force Putin into negotiating in earnest," Merezhko said.
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Ben Kelly and Sam Wilson.
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