Ukraine said on Sunday that it used three types of locally produced drones to pummel the Moscow region, in its biggest attack so far on the heavily defended capital.
The General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces said in a statement on Sunday that it used the FP-1 Firepoint and RS-1 Bars winged drones to hit several targets in the Moscow area.
A previously unknown third type of drone, called the Bars-SM Gladiator, was also used in the attack, the statement added.
“On May 16 and during the night of May 17, 2026, units of Ukraine’s Defense Forces struck a number of key Russian military targets,” the statement said.
Ukraine has increasingly sought to demonstrate the effectiveness of these drones, newly developed and relatively cheap in the realm of long-range weapons, by ramping up strikes deep into Russian territory and against Moscow. The capital is home to Russia’s densest air defense network by far.
The strikes were part of a wider Ukrainian barrage across the country this weekend that Russian authorities said killed at least four people, including three in the Moscow region.
In Moscow alone, the local mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, said on Sunday evening that the “massive attack” involved over 120 drones, the highest number ever reported in the urban region for a single day.
TATYANA MAKEYEVA / AFP via Getty Images
Ukraine’s General Staff said that among the targets hit were a microchip facility about 18 miles from central Moscow and a major oil pumping station about 30 miles from central Moscow.
Ukraine’s homegrown arsenal
Among the three Ukrainian weapons mentioned, the least is publicly known about the Bars-SM Gladiator.
Ukraine’s General Staff of the Armed Forces and its defense ministry did not respond to requests for comment sent outside regular business hours by Business Insider about this weekend’s attacks or the three drone types.
However, its name could indicate the Gladiator related to the RS-1 Bars.
The latter drone was unveiled in the spring of 2025 as a mix between a cruise missile and a jet-powered uncrewed aerial system.
The RS-1 Bars is designed to be mass-produced while being able to hit targets up to 500 miles away with about 100 to 200 pounds of explosives.
Ukraine hasn’t revealed who makes the RS-1 Bars, though it has said that the winged drone was developed by private manufacturers.
Much more has been publicly disclosed about the FP-1 Firepoint, a fixed-wing drone produced in late 2024 for deep-strike missions of over 900 miles.
Serhii Okunev / AFP via Getty Images
Shaped like a small plane, the FP-1 is designed by its namesake, the local firm Fire Point, to carry up to roughly 260 pounds of explosives. The turbojet drone is made to be launched easily without a runway, taking off with a rocket booster from a rail platform.
In December, the BBC reported that Fire Point makes its drones at a cost of about $50,000 each and is producing at least 200 per day.
Like the RS-1 Bars, it straddles the line between cruise missile and drone, though these one-way munitions travel much more slowly than a conventional cruise missile.
The declared range of both drones is well beyond the distance from Ukraine to Moscow, which is about 300 miles.
Cracking Moscow’s defenses
Striking Moscow would require a drone to penetrate a multilayered air defense system, which includes two rings of S-300 and S-400 long-range surface-to-air missile batteries.
The Russian capital also fields an assortment of electronic warfare systems and dozens of point-defense systems, such as the Pantsir and Tor.
As the Kremlin geared up for its high-profile Victory Day parade earlier this month, open-source intelligence analysts said satellite images showed over 100 such defenses spread across a 70-mile radius from the heart of Moscow.
“The concentration of Russian air defense systems in the Moscow region is the largest. But we are overcoming it,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Sunday.
Several popular Russian Telegram news channels have uploaded footage that appears to corroborate the General Staff’s claims.
One widely shared clip published by the channel ASTRA showed a major fire at the Elma Technopark in Zelenograd, a Moscow district home to the Angstrom semiconductor plant. The facility builds key electronics for precision-guided weapons.
Another clip also shows a massive fire at the Solnechnogorskaya pumping station, which was later extinguished by emergency crews.
Several channels have also reported fires near Moscow’s air travel hub, Sheremetyevo International Airport, and posted clips of winged drones flying over the capital city.
Yulia Morozova/Anadolu via Getty Images
Meanwhile, Zelenskyy said his country had also carried out strikes across Russia and occupied Ukrainian territories, including Crimea.
The Ukrainian attack came several days after Russia launched one of its most intense and longest drone attacks of the war so far, sending over 1,500 drones at Ukrainian cities in a span of two days. Zelenskyy said his country would respond in kind.
Russia’s defense ministry said on Sunday that it had shot down 1,054 Ukrainian fixed-wing drones across the country.
