Three of Moscow's four airports were affected, and Sheremetyevo handled arrivals and departures by prior coordination, according to the Federal Air Transport Agency (Rosaviatsia).
The flight restrictions came into force almost immediately after the international summit that Putin devoted the start of the week to, Agentstvo reported. By the Moscow mayor's statistics, the drone raid was the second-largest of the year.
A day earlier, more than 400 flights were delayed or cancelled in Moscow, St Petersburg and Ufa, according to a count by the Telegram channel Baza. The Moscow Times, citing Baza, reported that 149 flights were rescheduled at Sheremetyevo, 137 at Vnukovo and 42 at Domodedovo, with one cancelled. Pulkovo received 16 aircraft as an alternate airfield, cancelled six flights and delayed 57.
Russia's Defence Ministry said in a summary that 1,214 drones were shot down over 18 regions and Moscow overnight into 29 October. Bloomberg called it a record number for the entire war reported by the Russian authorities at one time. The previous record, logged by the Defence Ministry on 20 September, was 1,110 UAVs in a night.
According to Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, 613 drones flew toward Moscow and the region from the evening of 28 October to the morning of 29 October, and 231 of them were shot down on the approach to the capital.
Ufa's airport was closed twice during the night. One of Russia's largest chemical plants, the Bashkir Soda Company facility (Roskhim), was hit. The plant is on the closed register of defence enterprises kept by the Ministry of Industry and Trade and produces materials for body armour, helmets and protective components for military vehicles and aircraft.
In Ufa, the schedules of more than two dozen flights were shifted and one flight from Moscow was cancelled, according to Kirill Pervov, head of Bashkortostan's State Committee for Emergency Situations. A flight from Surgut was diverted to an alternate airfield in Chelyabinsk. Ekho, citing the online departure board, reported that no aircraft landed in Ufa between 08:00 and 14:45 local time, and some flights arrived four to eight hours late.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called Kyiv's decision to stage "such a massive drone attack" on the Russian capital during an event of "global scale" a "strange" one. He said it was grounds for continuing the war.