Ukraine strikes Moscow in biggest attack on Russia
Newshour
BBC
4.2 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 17 May 2026
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ukraine sent nearly 600 drones into Russia overnight, the biggest single attack on the country since the start of the war. Targets in Moscow and a patrol ship in the Caspian Sea were hit, with at least four killed in the offensive.
We hear from The Economist's Shashank Joshi about the significance of the strikes, and from Russia analyst Professor Nina Khrushcheva about how President Putin might respond.
Also in the programme: The Democratic Republic of the Congo fights to contain a deadly Ebola outbreak; and what does Che Guevara's daughter make of recent US hostility towards Cuba?
(Photo: A man inspects a damaged apartment building following a drone attack outside Moscow on May 17, 2026. Credit: EPA/Shutterstock)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:09.3 | Hello and welcome to NewsHour. It's coming to you live from the BBC World Service studios in central London. I'm Tim Franks. |
| 0:17.1 | Over the past four plus years of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, |
| 0:21.5 | we've often talked about the Russian military's huge aerial assaults deep into Ukraine. |
| 0:27.4 | Overnight, Ukraine launched what may well have been its biggest drone attack of the war. |
| 0:45.0 | Sound from a social media post that the Ukrainian president, Vladimir Zelensky, put up today showing drones flying with the sound. |
| 0:49.2 | You could just hear it there of gunshots, apparently attempting to shoot them down. |
| 0:53.4 | It was a massive assault hitting 14 regions across Russia. |
| 0:55.2 | At least four people were killed. |
| 1:01.4 | Moscow's main oil refinery was hit. President Zelensky said this was all entirely justified, |
| 1:04.5 | as he put it, given Vladimir Putin's prolongation of the war. |
| 1:10.4 | Shashank Joshi, is Defence Editor of the Economist. How significant did he think this attack was? |
| 1:16.4 | It's really significant, and I think that's to do with both numbers, but also the depth of the strikes and the breadth of the strikes. Just to start with numbers, it really is quite |
| 1:21.4 | something to see a salvo of what appears to be 800 drones. Russia says it shot down, perhaps, |
| 1:27.3 | nearly 600. |
| 1:28.3 | And so we're looking at a wave that is almost unimaginable by the standards of only a couple of years ago. |
| 1:33.4 | I think the record peak for a single drone assault back in 2024 was somewhere in the region of 150 drones, |
| 1:39.9 | not from the Russian side. If the Ukrainians are now managing, you know, 800, which was the Russian |
| 1:44.5 | record, I think, last year, it shows you what an incredible scaling up of their long-range drone |
| 1:51.1 | strike capacity they have managed in a way that I think no NATO country would be able to sustain |
| 1:56.4 | or manage or mimic in the same way. So that is really impressive. And as you say, this is long range. |
| 2:02.7 | There's also seems as if there's been a real breadth to this, which presumably then poses a challenge |
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