All four Moscow airports ground to a halt twice in the space of two days in late October 2026, as drone activity over the Russian capital triggered mass flight suspensions and sent passengers sheltering inside parked aircraft. Russia's security service has now announced arrests it says explain the threat behind those closures.
What the FSB Announced
According to AeroTime, Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) announced on 26 October 2026 that it had detained two men over an alleged plot to carry out drone strikes on targets in the Moscow region. The alleged targets were components of Moscow's missile-defence system and an electricity facility.
According to the FSB, both suspects were men originating from the South Caucasus region, with birth years of 1991 and 1998 respectively. Neither their names nor their citizenship were made public. The pair were remanded in custody and now face terrorism-related charges ahead of trial.
The FSB alleged the men were working on behalf of Ukraine's SBU security service. The agency released footage it said showed a suspect confession and scenes of drone assembly, as reported by TASS. Ukraine has not been named as having confirmed or denied involvement.
The Alleged Plan
The scheme, as described by the FSB, relied on caching equipment in Russia before any operation began. FPV drones and explosive components were reportedly retrieved from hidden locations in the Smolensk and Kaluga regions.
The plan allegedly called for transporting those drones into the Moscow region, where they would then be activated remotely by operators based in Ukraine. The FSB's account describes a network stretching from western Russia to Ukrainian territory, coordinated across a significant distance.
How Moscow Airports Were Affected
On 23 October 2026, Sheremetyevo (SVO), Domodedovo (DME), Vnukovo (VKO) and Zhukovsky (ZIA), all four of Moscow's commercial airports, suspended arrivals and departures simultaneously due to drone activity. That closure was itself the second time all four airports had shut together within two days, a sequence that underlines how directly the drone campaign has come to affect civil aviation in the Russian capital.
At Sheremetyevo, the disruption was immediate and physical: travellers in transit or awaiting boarding found themselves ushered into shelters, as did passengers who were already seated on aircraft standing at the airport. This was far removed from the abstract frustration of watching a departures board tick over.
Readers tracking airport disruptions and airline operations across the region can use our Airline Search tool to check carriers serving these airports.
The Broader Drone Campaign
The Moscow airport closures sit within a sustained pattern of long-range drone activity over Russian territory. An overnight attack on 9 to 10 October 2026 involved 160 drones in total, of which 110 were jet-powered Shahed variants, according to AeroTime. Strikes from that single attack were recorded at 14 separate locations. Ukraine's Air Force reported shooting down or jamming 117 aircraft from the same attack, including 82 of the jet-powered drones.
Russia has broadened its deployment of jet-propelled Shahed attack drones, a variant that achieves higher speeds and greater altitudes than the propeller-driven models on which the design was originally based. The growing frequency of their appearance has altered the air-defence calculations facing both ground forces and civil aviation.
Our Squawk 7700 hub carries the live emergency board and incident archive for aviation events linked to the conflict and beyond. We will update our coverage if official sources or investigators release further information on the security situation around Moscow's airports.
Zelenskyy's Parallel Remarks
In a separate development, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, speaking in an interview broadcast on 25 October 2026, indicated that Ukraine could be open to suspending strikes against Russian oil refineries provided Russia stopped targeting Ukrainian electricity infrastructure, as reported by AeroTime. He also floated the possibility of arrangements involving satellite connectivity over Russian missile-launch sites, or the provision of further Patriot air-defence systems.
Those remarks came one day before the FSB announced the arrests, placing both developments in the same week of diplomatic and security activity.
The Bottom Line
The twice-over shutdown of all four Moscow airports in 48 hours is an operational benchmark. Whatever the outcome of the FSB's prosecution, the effect on civil aviation infrastructure is already documented. Passengers, airlines and airport operators in Russia now face a threat environment in which closures of this scale can recur at short notice.
The FSB's claim that the alleged plotters targeted missile-defence sites rather than the airports themselves is a reminder that civil aviation disruption is often a secondary consequence of military activity rather than a direct aim. The airports closed because the threat to military infrastructure overhead made normal operations untenable, not because terminals were the intended target.
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