'Moscow will burn': Ukraine's defiant warning after launching largest drone strike of the war

As we are recording this episode, there are reports that Moscow is under attack for the third time in a week, just hours after the most dramatic and largest drone and missile strike on the Russian capital of the war.

Some 900, nearly 1,000 drones, according to Russian officials, were shot down between the 17th and the 18th of June.

Four missiles, they said, also shot down.

But a number got through, and I expect many of you will have already seen the most extraordinary scenes from the southeastern edge of the city where the, uh, Moscow oil refinery, a major plant run by Gazprom Neft, was hit at least five times.

Huge plumes of smoke, fires burning in the refinery.

Plumes of smoke so large that it really felt like a wall of thick, black, oily smoke rising over the southern edge of the city and blanketing some neighborhoods.

Reports of thick, oily smoke dripping back down onto the city.

And during that attack, one of the most spectacular images we saw was the lid of a large gasoline tank blowing off the tank, uh, as there was an explosion underneath it.

Footage today has emerged suggesting that actually that explosion may not have been caused by a Ukrainian drone but in fact was caused by a malfunctioning or misfired air defense missile.

A clip I've been looking at today appears to show a missile corkscrewing horizontally, hitting that tank and exploding it and sending the lid, uh, flying skywards.

In the 24 hours since, we've heard from Moscow's mayor, uh, Sergei Sobyanin, who is saying that another 25 drones have been shot down today.

So that suggests that the attack is continuing.

And that large attack on the 17th, 18th that I was talking about came 24 hours after a previous attack targeted the same plant.

And, uh, con- reports according to the Reuters news agency suggesting that the first wave of attacks on the night of the 16th, 17th, uh, destroyed one part of the refining mana- the refining plant.

Uh, the second attack targeting a different part of this plant.

We're gonna talk about this attack, or these attacks, a lot in this episode 'cause it's really important.

This plant supplies around a third of the gasoline to Moscow, gasoline and, uh, Jet A-1 aviation fuel.

It's just 10 miles from the Kremlin.

So the very fact that Ukraine was able to strike it significantly and two days in a row, perhaps three days in a row if that's what they're targeting again today, is extraordinary.

And it's a reminder of the leaps and bounds that Ukraine has made in terms of its long-range strike capability.

Ukraine has managed spectacular long-range strikes throughout the war.

But what's... what we've seen recently is the tempo and scale of these attacks increasing.

The sort of audacity has been increasing as well because before we saw these strikes on, on Moscow, we were seeing very similar strikes against refinery, against refineries just outside St. Petersburg, so visible from St. Petersburg Harbor.

And of course, remember those attacks against, uh, like, the Ust-Luga port in the Baltics.

So hitting major Russian infrastructure, particularly oil and gas infrastructure and, in parallel, continuing to degrade the logistics support for, uh, Russia's armed forces.