Moscow's mayor shot down more drones than the entire Russian defence ministry

On the night to Sunday, 20 September 2026, Moscow and its surroundings were the target of a Ukrainian drone attack. That is the only part of the story everyone agrees on. Everything else (how many drones, how many wounded, whether anyone was hurt at all) depends on which Russian official spoke and which Slovenian outlet copied him.

Four official numbers for one night

Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin said on Telegram that air defences had intercepted and destroyed more than 1,600 drones, 450 of them aimed at the city itself.

"This unprecedented attack was obviously planned to disrupt the elections. The enemy did not succeed." (translated)

The Russian defence ministry counted the same event differently. According to its data, air defences shot down 1,110 drones, and not over Moscow but over nineteen Russian regions and Crimea combined. That means the mayor of a single capital counted almost 500 more drones than his own defence ministry found over half the country.

Moscow region governor Andrei Vorobyov, a third official in the same chain, arrived at 249 downed drones.

Bloomberg noted a fourth figure from Sobyanin: that 152 drones attacked Moscow overnight, while more than 1,600 were reportedly aimed at the capital in the past 24 hours.

"The Russian defence ministry said air defences shot down 1,110 Ukrainian drones over 19 Russian regions and in Crimea, which the Kremlin annexed in 2014. This is the largest number of drones in a single overnight attack that Russia has reported this year, and it exceeds the previous record of 822 drones from August." (translated)

So: 1,600, 1,110, 452 (249 + 152 in different readings), 450. None of these numbers is independently verified, because they cannot be verified. They all come from the Telegram channels of three Russian officials, in the middle of elections that those same officials declared a target of the attack.

Six wounded. Or twenty.

Here it gets closer to home. N1 published an article the same day under the headline "Two dead and 20 wounded in Ukrainian drone attack in Moscow". The body of the same article says:

"Moscow region governor Andrei Vorobyov also said on Telegram that at least two people died in the attack and six were wounded, BBC reports." (translated)

The headline says twenty. The text says six. The source is the same governor, the same post, the same paragraph. RTV SLO, which ran the same STA wire report (STA is the Slovenian Press Agency), has twenty at this point. So one agency story differs by fourteen wounded people between two Slovenian outlets.

Neither seems to have noticed the difference. There is no correction. There is no note. The headline goes out to aggregators and social networks, not the fifth paragraph.

What can actually be verified

Both sides acknowledge that a Moscow refinery was damaged: Sobyanin and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. The plant is owned by Gazprom Neft, stands about 25 kilometres from the Kremlin and processes around 245,000 barrels a day. Gazprom Neft's press office did not respond to Bloomberg's request for comment.

Sobyanin also said that nobody was injured at the refinery. Same mayor, same post in which he counted 1,600 drones.

"One of Russia's key oil infrastructure sites and a logistics facility of the aggressor were hit. This is about billions of dollars that sustain the (Russian) war machine." (translated)

The attack came despite a statement by US president Donald Trump at the start of the week that Ukraine and Russia had reached a deal to stop attacking each other's energy infrastructure. The deal lasted a few days.

The other side, missing from the headlines

While Slovenian media were counting drones over Moscow, Russian forces on Saturday evening attacked the Vyshhorod district north of Kyiv. At least four people died: three children and a woman. According to governor Tymur Tkachenko, 31 buildings were damaged, including residential blocks. A priest died in a drone attack on a monastery in the Kherson region.

RTV has this part in a subheading. N1 does not have it.

Two dead in Moscow is the headline. Four dead near Kyiv, three of them children, is a related item.