Towering over Moscow’s golden church domes and Stalin-era skyscrapers is the uber-modern business district of Moskva-Citi.
Located 7.6km (4.7m) from Red Square and the Kremlin, Moscow’s answer to London’s Canary Wharf or New York’s Financial District has been hastily built over the last 20 years.
It is now home to the highest number of skyscrapers in Europe.
The muddy front lines of the war in Ukraine must feel very far away.
Yet one of Moskva-Citi’s glitzy skyscrapers has been hit by drones twice in the space of a few days.
On 30 and 31 July, two separate drones crashed into the building’s glass facade, shattering parts of it. Reports said that the section that was hit houses the ministry of economic development and that its employees have now been told to work from home.
The scale of devastation is a fraction of that endured by Ukraine since Russian launched its full-scale invasion last year. But witness reports from the scene in Moscow sound strikingly similar to the everyday accounts Ukrainians have been sharing since the start of the war.
One resident, Arkady Metler, was defiant: “There wasn’t much panic, just everyone went outside. There is no fear… All we can do now is stick together and everything will be fine,” he told AFP.
But others were considerably more nervous.
“During the night I was woken up by a bang, there was an explosion,” Anastasia Berseneva told the BBC. “I looked out of the window and I saw that cars were stopping and that’s how I realised that it [a drone attack] had happened.”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I think I’m going to move from here,” Ms Berseneva said.
Source: bbc.com
