Cuban residents in Moscow described scenes of panic and sleepless nights following the largest drone attack against the Russian capital recorded to date, launched by Ukraine on Sunday coinciding with the final day of the Russian parliamentary elections.
The testimonies circulated in the Facebook group 'Cubans in Moscow', a community with over 76,000 members, where residents from different areas of the city and its surroundings recounted the distress experienced during the attacks.
They were flying over my house, I'm still in shock, wrote a Cuban while sharing her experience. The comment was picked up on her social media by independent journalist Magdiel Jorge Castro.
Another resident, located in Kotélniki, a town near the capital, described how the devices “would fly overhead, exploding very close,” while the alarms of the vehicles on the street went off and she ended up shaking with fear.
In the same community groups, messages emerged from individuals who claimed they couldn't sleep and chose to stay away from windows and doors during the alerts.
A woman who had already witnessed the explosion of a drone up close advised other residents to go down to the lower floors of the buildings as soon as the alarms went off.
The Ukrainian attack primarily targeted the Kapotnia oil refinery —one of the largest in Russia— and the Sofyino logistics complex in the Moscow region, where a large-scale fire was captured on video by a Russian citizen.
The mayor of Moscow, Serguéi Sobianin, reported that more than 450 drones aimed at the capital have been shot down; in total, over 1,600 have been intercepted on various fronts since the previous Saturday.
The Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed the operation and described the impact as "very significant," arguing that the facilities targeted support the Russian "war machine."
The casualty figures varied according to the sources: BBC Mundo reported at least two dead and 20 injured, while other agencies raised the number to four dead and 21 injured in the region. Among the confirmed victims is a 44-year-old woman who died in Sofyino after a drone struck a residential building.
The testimonies of Cubans in Moscow arrive at a time of increasing involvement of citizens from the island in the conflict. Amnesty International reported that Russia is recruiting Cubans for war through deception and coercion, in practices that could amount to human trafficking.
The Ukrainian project "I Want to Live" identified 1,028 Cubans recruited by Russia and at least 96 deceased in combat, while estimates from Ukrainian intelligence suggest that up to 20,000 Cubans have been sent to the front since 2023.
The Cuban regime denies any official connection with these recruitment networks and claims that the Cubans involved are acting "on their own"; the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has stated that Cuba "is not part of the armed conflict in Ukraine".
For the Cubans living in Moscow as civilian migrants, the Ukrainian attacks have transformed a war that until now they mostly followed through the news into a threat that arrives directly at their windows.
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