Record Ukrainian drone strike hits St Petersburg; oil terminal ablaze, one dead
A massive overnight Ukrainian drone attack on St Petersburg killed at least one person, injured five, set fire to two oil facilities and hit a logistics centre, Russian officials said on Sunday.
Russia's second-largest city came under what officials described as the heaviest Ukrainian drone attack on the region since the start of the war. St Petersburg governor Alexander Beglov said one person was killed and five others were taken to hospital after the overnight strikes, while firefighters were still battling blazes on Sunday at the city's oil terminal, the Ruchi oil depot and industrial warehouses in the southern Kolpinsky district.
Leningrad region governor Alexander Drozdenko said air defences brought down 145 drones over the region during the night. According to the TASS news agency, that is the highest number officially reported for the area, beating the previous record of 144 set in June, during the St Petersburg International Economic Forum. Russia's Defence Ministry claimed that 1,015 Ukrainian drones were intercepted overnight across about fifteen regions, including the Moscow region.
Online retail giant Ozon said one of its logistics centres in the city had been hit. Ukrainian monitoring channels and the Kyiv Independent also reported strikes on a data centre of the social network VKontakte, port infrastructure, an electricity substation and a bridge, with local power and water outages; Russian authorities have not confirmed those details. Beglov said about a dozen apartment blocks and two private houses were damaged, and an AFP journalist saw smoke covering part of the southern sky on Sunday morning.
The St Petersburg Oil Terminal, located in the city's port, is one of Russia's largest fuel storage and export facilities, with a reported capacity of 12.5 million tonnes a year. Since early October, Ukraine has also hit several data centres, including facilities belonging to Yandex, presenting its long-range campaign as a response to Russian strikes on Ukrainian energy and civilian infrastructure.
The attack comes amid friction with Washington. US President Donald Trump had urged Kyiv to stop striking Russian refineries, arguing that it drives up oil and fuel prices, and last Sunday unilaterally announced an "energy truce" between the two sides. After a pause of a few days, Ukraine said on Thursday it was resuming the strikes, accusing Moscow of never halting its own attacks.