Ukraine unleashed one of its largest long-range drone bombardments of the war before dawn on Tuesday at targets across Russia, including dozens of strikes directed at the Moscow region, as both sides stepped up attacks ahead of talks intended to end three years of fighting.
The Russian Ministry of Defense claimed to have shot down 337 drones, with at least 91 sent toward the capital and the region around it.
Moscow’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, said the attack was the largest against the city since the start of the war. At least two people were killed and 14 more were injured, the Russian authorities said.
In Moscow, at least one residential building was damaged, with its roof charred, after a drone explosion. All four international airports, serving a metropolitan area of 21 million, were forced to suspend operations temporarily because of the attack, the country’s aviation watchdog said.
Ukraine has proposed an immediate truce in the air, saying it would immediately stop long-range strikes into Russia if Moscow agreed to an equivalent halt.
That plan, supported by European nations, including France, is envisioned as a first step in building trust ahead of talks about the overall conflict, in which over a million Ukrainian and Russian soldiers have been killed or injured.
High-level delegations from Ukraine and the United States were scheduled to begin meeting in Saudi Arabia at noon on Tuesday to discuss a possible path the ending the war.
In addition to a partial truce in the air, Ukraine was also expected to press the case for a halt to strikes on the Black Sea, as a way to gauge whether Moscow was willing to take any steps to end the fighting.
The predawn strikes appeared to be designed as a reminder that Ukraine, despite suffering brutal attacks and enduring huge losses, continues to expand its capacity to hit back at Russia.
President Volodymyr Zelensky has said that Ukraine plans to produce 30,000 long-range strike drones and 3,000 long-range missiles this year, building its domestic arms-making abilities even as U.S. military assistance remains suspended.
Russia has maintained its relentless bombardment of Ukrainian civilian and military institutions over the course of the war. Nearly every night in recent weeks, Russia has launched over 100 drones at targets across Ukraine, including at Kyiv, the capital.
The assaults frequently include a combination of ballistic and cruise missiles in an effort to saturate Ukrainian air defenses.
The Ukrainian Air Force said that the latest attack overnight Monday and into Tuesday morning from Russia included 126 drones and one ballistic missile.
Explosions echoed across Kyiv around midnight as air defense teams scrambled, and the Ukrainian Air Force said it shot down or disabled most of the drones as well as the missile.
Since President Trump spoke by telephone with President Vladimir V. Putin on Feb. 12 — the first official contact between the heads of state for the United States and Russia in years — more than 100 civilians have been killed in Russian strikes, according to data compiled by The New York Times based on reports from Ukrainian authorities.
The intensifying strikes have been accompanied by shifting dynamics on the front line, with Russian forces, assisted by thousands of North Korean soldiers, retaking a large part of the territory in Russia’s Kursk region that had been occupied by Ukrainian forces.
Kyiv had hoped to use its control of that swath of land as leverage in any negotiations to end the war, but the recent developments may have changed that calculus, because the cost of holding the territory could outweigh any diplomatic gain.
With the Ukrainian salient in Kursk now collapsed to an area around Sudzha, about six miles across the border, and its supply lines under constant attack, their hold on the area is increasingly precarious.
The top Ukrainian military commander, Oleksandr Syrsky, said on Monday night that Kyiv was dispatching reinforcements. He rejected Russian claims that a large contingent of Ukrainian soldiers were at risk of encirclement.
“A decision was made to reinforce our group with the necessary forces and resources, including electronic warfare and drones,” he said. “Currently, there is no threat of encirclement of our units in the Kursk region.”
At the same time, there are signs that the Russian offensive in eastern Ukraine has stalled. Russia has gained almost no ground for over a week and Ukrainian forces have engaged in limited counterattacks to regain small patches of land, according to Ukrainian soldiers and military analysts who use combat footage to track the daily movements along the front.
In Moscow, railway tracks near the Domodedovo airport south of Moscow were damaged, leading to a suspension of train service.
At least 20 cars were burned at a parking lot in the nearby town of Domodedovo, according to Andrei Vorobyev, the region’s governor, who issued a statement.
A 38-year-old security guard died on site because of the attack, Mr. Vorobyev said.
