Russia’s second city woke up to sirens, explosions and burning fuel tanks on Sunday. Shortly before 3 a.m. local time, Ukrainian monitoring channels began reporting a large drone swarm heading for St Petersburg, roughly 850 kilometres from the nearest point of the Ukrainian border. By dawn, Governor Alexander Beglov was listing the damage: blazes at the city’s big oil export terminal, at the Ruchyi fuel depot and at several warehouses in Kolpino, one person dead and five hurt. Later in the day, state-run outlets said ten people had been hurt.
The port terminal is one of the country’s biggest hubs for storing and exporting petroleum products, moving roughly 12.5 million tonnes of fuel a year. It had already been struck in early July. Fire Point, a Ukrainian arms maker, said its own FP-1 long-range drone had taken part; Kyiv itself did not comment officially in the first hours.
The night also hit targets that have little to do with oil. Online retailer Ozon said one of its logistics centres caught fire after a drone strike, adding that staff had been evacuated without injuries. The social network VK confirmed that a regional data centre had been attacked, while insisting that its services kept running, even though many users reported outages. A dozen apartment blocks and a pair of private homes suffered damage, and Pulkovo Airport briefly suspended flights. Moscow’s defence ministry said 1,015 drones had been downed over Russia overnight, 127 of them above the Leningrad region alone, according to its governor Aleksandr Drozdenko.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov played the raid down, arguing that such strikes could not “change the course of events”. Yet the attack shows how little remains of the “energy ceasefire” announced by Donald Trump last week. Volodymyr Zelensky says Russia has hit Ukrainian energy sites 76 times since then, and both sides are now pounding each other’s power and fuel infrastructure as winter approaches.
