A “massive” Ukrainian drone attack on St Petersburg in Russia has killed at least one person and injured five others, the city’s governor said on Sunday. Alexandre Beglov said firefighters were battling several blazes, including at the St Petersburg oil terminal and the Ruchi oil depot.
Fires also broke out at industrial warehouses in the Kolpino district, south of the city. Beglov added that several residential buildings and two houses had been struck.
Damage and disruption across St Petersburg and the Leningrad region
City authorities said the attack disrupted flights at St Petersburg’s main airport, one of the busiest in the country. Beglov said the airport was restricting operations “for safety reasons”.
Russian e-commerce firm Ozon said a fire had broken out at its logistics hub in St Petersburg. The internet company VK said its data centre in the Leningrad region had been hit by drones, but added that services remained available to users.
Alexander Drozdenko, governor of the Leningrad region that surrounds the city, said 145 drones had been shot down. He said about 20,000 people were left without electricity after the raid. The state-run news agency TASS said the assault was the largest on the region in four years, while Moscow’s defence ministry said 1,015 Ukrainian drones had been neutralised overnight.
Strikes inside Ukraine and Zelenskyy’s casualty figures
In Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russian forces had struck residential buildings overnight, killing two people and wounding 12, including two children. In a post on X on Sunday, he also pointed to a strike on an agricultural enterprise in Volyn, saying necessary services were working at the site.
Zelenskyy said Russia had launched nearly 2,700 attack drones, 1,700 aerial bombs and 66 missiles, most of them ballistic, against Ukraine over the past week alone.
Dispute over the energy ceasefire and US sanctions waiver
The attacks followed Zelenskyy’s comments earlier in the week that Kyiv would resume hitting Russian refineries. He said he was standing up for his war-torn country as support from the United States declined. Speaking to the Financial Times, he said Kyiv was “done” with the “energy ceasefire” that United States President Donald Trump had declared unilaterally, and that it would resume strikes on Russia in retaliation for a wave of attacks.
Trump had announced an immediate energy ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine the previous week, but Zelenskyy said Moscow had continued to violate it. In his Sunday post, he claimed Russia had deliberately attacked Ukraine’s energy, oil and gas sectors 76 times since the ceasefire was announced. He also said substations in the Vinnytsia, Zhytomyr, Khmelnytskyi and Odesa regions had been struck overnight, leaving tens of thousands of families without power.
Trump is also facing criticism in Europe and the US after he signed an executive order on Friday waiving sanctions and tariffs aimed at Moscow’s energy revenues. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Saturday that the waiver would act as a pause, allowing the administration to “analyse” its impact on the global economy. Rubio said the restrictions affected several countries, not only Russia. Trump said late on Saturday that the decision would benefit the US.
