Moscow and the Moscow region were struck on June 18 by the largest Ukrainian drone attack since the full-scale war began — and residents received no warning it was coming.
“No SMS at all, no sirens. All the information is in local chats — there’s a lot more there than on TV,” one reader wrote to Meduza. He said he lives in southeastern Moscow, near the Moscow Oil Refinery — the facility that caught fire after being struck by drones.
“We’ve been awake since 4:48 a.m. Not a single SMS, not a single siren,” a reader of the independent Telegram channel Astra told the outlet.
“Are we going to comment at all on the fact that no danger alert has been issued and there hasn’t been a single siren or a single text message? Or did I miss something?” one city resident wrote in her Telegram channel, as quoted by Astra.
Residents of Ramenskoye, Kotelniki, and Krasnogorsk — all on Moscow’s immediate outskirts — learned of the threat only when they saw drones overhead or spotted the damage, the Telegram channel Podnyem also reports. No SMS messages, no street sirens, no other alerts were issued.
The administration of Kotelniki, near which the Moscow Oil Refinery is located, told residents it bears no responsibility for activating warning systems — that function belongs to the Emergency Situations Ministry, the Telegram channel Daily Storm reports.
The authorities of Orekhovo-Zuyevo, for their part, announced that the decision to activate public warning systems and sound sirens “is made based on the current operational situation and only when there is an immediate threat.”
The Kotelniki administration also said it would not disclose the locations of shelters to residents, stating that this information “will be communicated to the public during a period of mobilization and in wartime.” Formally, as Meduza has repeatedly reported, mobilization has not ended — Putin has not signed a corresponding decree.
At Meduza, we are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The story you’re reading was written by one of our living, breathing journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model configured to follow our strict editorial standards. This translation process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. A Meduza editor reviews every draft before publication.
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