Moscow tower struck by drone for second time in days

A Moscow high-rise that houses government offices was struck in a drone attack just two days after it was last hit, the city’s Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said.

The Tuesday strike on the 21st floor of the IQ-Quarter building, which houses Economic Development ministry offices, did not result in any casualties, according to officials.

Russian air defenses shot down several other drones targeting the capital region and jammed the projectile that hit the government building, causing it to go “out of control,” defense officials said.

Photos of the building showed exterior glass panels missing or damaged, exposing the charred interior — with witnesses saying security services fled as huge shards of glass fell.

Just 48 hours earlier, a security guard was injured by falling debris after Russian officials said it had jammed two drones that crashed into the same government-office building.

Defense officials labeled that Sunday strike an “attempted terrorist attack.”

Ukraine once again did not directly take responsibility for the latest attack, but top presidential advisor Mykhailo Podolyak tweeted that Moscow “is rapidly getting used to a full-fledged war.”

The strike came after drones targeted the Moscow area three times last week as Ukraine expanded its counteroffensive against Russia, which invaded 18 months ago.

However, the puzzling circumstances of consecutive attacks on the same building, located less than five miles from the Kremlin, raised the eyebrows of even Russian state media editors.

“A drone hitting the same tower for the second time in a row, where three federal ministries are located, at least requires explaining the comments that the electronic warfare downed them all,” posted Margarita Simonyan, chief editor of the state-funded TV channel RT.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov redirected a question about the safety of the Russian capital to the Defense Ministry, saying only that “the threat exists and measures are being taken.”

A witness to the most recent IQ-Quarter attack got caught up while going there to see the damage from the earlier strike.

 “Suddenly there was this explosion, and we immediately ran,” they said. “There were shards of glass, and then smoke rising. Then the security services [started] running that way. The shards were really big.”

Russian military officials also said they diffused a drone strike on two of its warships in the Black Sea overnight, destroying three maritime drones.

The counter-offensives followed a Monday Russian missile strike on a residential building in Kryvyi Rih that killed seven people — including a 10-year-old girl — and injured dozens in Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky’s hometown.

A university building was also damaged in the attack, injuring 81 people, including seven children, officials said.

A barrage of attacks on Kharkiv destroyed an educational building and damaged a sports complex, injuring a security guard there.

Russian forces also shelled a medical facility in Kherson Tuesday, killing a doctor and injuring a nurse, the region’s governor said.

“A young talented doctor was killed, who was on his first day of work after internship. It was his first working day, which ended without even starting,” Kherson region health department head Tetiana Karchevych said at the site of the attack.

With Post wires