Drone again hits a building in Moscow that houses Russian ministries

When an office building next to her gleaming glass-house skyscraper in Moscow was hit by a drone loaded with explosives early Sunday, Mari Kletanina appeared concerned.

A popular nutritionist on Instagram, she asked her tens of thousands of followers if she should consider moving away from the area or from Russia altogether.

But after the same thing happened at dawn on Tuesday, it appeared Ms Kletanina had already moved on, focusing instead on choosing her dress for the day and recommending her favorite perfume.

With Ukraine it signals strikes in Russia have become part of the country’s strategyand residents of some of the most expensive areas of Moscow, realizing the reality that the war will not leave them untouched, some Russians resorted to a common tactic: trying to push the bad news out of their minds in order to go about their daily lives .

“People ignore it knowingly or unknowingly,” wrote Aleksandr Kynev, a Russian political analyst. “They want to shut themselves off from it because they want to keep their lives as normal as possible.”

Their efforts have been aided by Russian state television, which dismissed the incidents as minor and emphasized in their reports that the drones, suppressed using electronic warfare, caused little damage.

Mirlan Yzakov, who owns an investment firm with an office in a Moscow tower block, said he learned about the attacks on the news and that it did not affect his work. His team continues to work from their offices, he said.

“This is the time for conflict, a conflict of interest, so this is a natural procedure,” said Mr. Yzakov. “We live in a difficult time.”

Russian government officials appeared to be more serious about the threat.

Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, compared the attacks to 9/11, but Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said he sees no parallels. Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Mr. Peskov that the latest drone attacks showed that “there is a clear threat” and that “measures are being taken” to improve the defense of the capital.

The country’s bloggers tried to portray the attacks as an act of desperation on Ukraine’s part, aiming to divert media attention at a time when the Ukrainian counter-offensive has been slowly moving forward.

“There is no military damage,” Andrei Perla, political commentator for Tzargrad, an ultranationalist TV channel, wrote Sunday after the first attack: “But there is a psychological effect.”

At least 28 drones have attacked Moscow and the surrounding suburban region over the past three months, according to to Verstka, a Russian news website. They have done little damage and never resulted in serious injuries, but have hit a wide range of targets: from the Senate Palace in the Kremlin, the headquarters of President Vladimir V. Putin, to buildings just a stone’s throw away from the headquarters’ military headquarters.

The towers, which were hit on Tuesday and over the weekend, have been hailed as a symbol of an oil-fuelled, booming Russian economy that was becoming integrated into the global economy – a process that has been abruptly halted by the invasion of Ukraine .

The Russian Ministry of Digital Development, whose offices were hit by one of the drones, sent its staff to work from home, the agency’s representative told Interfax, a news agency, on Tuesday.

Maksim Khodyrev, a real estate agent specializing in the Moscow area, said that after the second attack, he began receiving letters from apartment tenants who said they no longer felt safe and were “thinking about canceling leases.”

“If this will be the end of it, in a month everyone will forget these incidents and things will go back to normal,” said Mr. Khodyrev in written comments. “If the attacks continue, then there will be no new sales at current prices.”

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