Ukraine Hits Petroleum Terminal on St. Petersburg's Waterfront
In a series of strikes overnight Saturday, Ukraine hit warehouses and energy infrastructure around the St. Petersburg region, damaging a petroleum product export terminal on the city's waterfront - defying the demands of President Donald Trump and gaining high-profile media coverage in the process.
According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, air-defense units downed more than 1,000 Ukrainian drones near Moscow, St. Petersburg and surrounding areas. It may have been Ukraine's largest-scale strike yet, surpassing a similar broad-scale attack over western Russia in June.
The local governor confirmed in a statement on social media that drones had ignited fires at the St. Petersburg oil terminal, the oil depot at Ruchyi, two transformer substations and a complex of industrial warehouses. The casualties included five injured and one dead.
From bystander imagery, the strike appears to have reached a tank in the center of the Peterburgskiy Neftyanoy Terminal, a petroleum product loading terminal located on the port's central waterfront. The terminal was hit during the previous large-scale strike in June.
The Ruchyi oil depot, located near Piskarevsky Ave. and Shafirovskiy Prospekt on the city's northeastern edge, is a smaller local depot; it suffered a previous explosion in September 2023.
Other targets included a distribution center for Russian e-commerce retailer Ozon and a data center for VKontakte, a Russian social media network.
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One of the targets of tonight's massive Ukrainian drone attack on Leningrad Oblast was the Korabelny Bridge in the city centre of St Petersburg. The bridge connects the port of St Petersburg and the southern part of the city with the northern suburbs. It likely came in response to Russia's repeated drone strikes on key bridges across the Dnieper River in Kyiv and Zaporizhzhia.
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The attacks are far from one-sided. Russian forces have launched about 2,600 drones and hit Ukrainian power infrastructure more than 70 times in the past week, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky - who noted that Russia never accepted or attempted to comply with Trump's request for a ceasefire on energy-site attacks.
