Hundreds Of Thousands In Moscow Experience Rare ‘Total Blackout’ After Drone Wave

Something very rare just happened in Moscow. Large swathes of Russian capital were plunged into darkness Wednesday after a swarm of inbound Ukrainian drones resulted in a fire at a key electrical substation.

People reported widespread outages across the Moscow region, including a “total blackout” in areas southeast of the capital, leaving homes without electricity for over four hours.

A blackout in Moscow: up to 600,000 residents are without electricity, according to Russian media. pic.twitter.com/X9EXYk28Gr

— WW3 Monitor (@WW3_Monitor) December 30, 2025

Power was cut to hundreds of thousands of residents in and around Moscow, though estimates have varied from 100,000 to up to 600,000 people impacted.

Social media videos and images showed apartment buildings, streets, and and businesses in areas like Zhukovsky, Lyubertsy, Lytkarino, and Ramenskoye, in total darkness.

Moscow authorities confirmed they deployed an army emergency crews with mobile generators to darkened city sectors as repairs were being made.

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said at least 100 drones were intercepted between 5:00 and 7pm that night. At least eight were shot down directly over the Moscow region – though drones were observed over various parts of the country, as has become an almost nightly norm.

The evening drone wave resulted temporary closures at Moscow’s airports, disrupting air traffic, which has also occurred a number of times before.

This marks a rare moment that the power grid has been successfully targeted in Moscow, after literally hundreds of attacks on oil and gas sites in various other oblasts of the country, particularly near the Black Sea and southwest Russia.

While numbers have varied, this was clearly a very widespread outage across various districts in Moscow Oblast:

In the Moscow region, 120 thousand people were left without electricity. A blackout has been observed in Ramenskoye, which has lasted for more than four hours. The administration promises to fix the accident in a couple of hours. Also, messaging apps are not working.

So far… pic.twitter.com/t82RntWil0

— Beefeater (@Beefeater_Fella) December 30, 2025

It is more typical for Ukrainian cities to be suffering, amid cold and increasingly winter temperatures. The national grid has needed so many new parts at such rapid pace that it can’t keep up.

“Russian strikes on Ukraine’s power grid will continue without President Trump stepping in, Ukraine’s top energy executive has warned, as millions risk a freezing winter without power,” Fox reports.

“DTEK’s Maxim Timchenko spoke out as Ukraine braced for further Russian drone and missile attacks on energy infrastructure and a day after Trump met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for the third time to bring an end to the nearly four-year war,” it adds.