ST. PETERSBURG — Ukrainian drones set fire to the St. Petersburg Oil Terminal and the city’s Ruchi oil depot overnight into Sunday, killing at least one person and injuring five, regional Gov. Alexander Beglov said, BBC News, Al Jazeera and CBC News reported.
Russia’s Defence Ministry said its forces destroyed 1,015 Ukrainian drones over 15 Russian regions, as well as annexed Crimea and the Black Sea — one of Kyiv’s largest aerial bombardments of the war, according to CBC News. Russia’s state news agency TASS called it the largest attack on the St. Petersburg region in four years.
A logistics centre belonging to online retailer Ozon — known as Russia’s Amazon — and a data centre run by the social network VK were also hit, and both companies confirmed the strikes. Beglov said 12 apartment buildings and two homes were damaged and Pulkovo Airport was temporarily closed, the BBC reported. Leningrad region Gov. Alexander Drozdenko said 145 drones were shot down over his region and about 20,000 people were left without electricity.
Kyiv had not commented on the strikes. They follow Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s statement this week that Ukraine was “done” with the “energy ceasefire” President Donald Trump announced on Oct. 11, and would resume hitting Russian refineries in retaliation for Moscow’s attacks, as Al Jazeera reported. Trump has criticized Ukraine’s strikes on Russian oil infrastructure.
In a post on X on Sunday, Zelenskyy said that since the ceasefire announcement, “Russia has deliberately attacked Ukraine’s energy and oil and gas sectors 76 times.” He said Russian strikes overnight killed two people and injured 12, including two children, and that over the past week Russia launched almost 2,700 attack drones, 1,700 aerial bombs and 66 missiles.
“America should see that Russia is not taking any reciprocal steps in response to sanctions relief or agreements,” Zelenskyy wrote, two days after Trump signed an order waiving the Graham Act sanctions on Moscow. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has described the waiver as a 60-day pause to analyze what the sanctions and tariffs would mean for the global and U.S. economies.
Sources: BBC News, Al Jazeera, CBC News
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