Massive drone attack on St. Petersburg; explosions and fires reported
Monitoring channels reported explosions and fires in Russia's second-largest city overnight into Sunday. The governor of the Leningrad region says 57 drones were shot down.
Archive image · Photo: Artyom Svetlov / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0 (cropped and resized)
Ukraine launched a large-scale drone attack on St. Petersburg overnight into Sunday, according to monitoring channels. It began at around 2:50 a.m. local time, they said; eyewitness footage shows drones over the city and air defenses responding. The governor of the surrounding Leningrad region, Alexander Drozdenko, said 57 Ukrainian drones had been shot down. Debris damaged four cars in a parking lot, and a fire was reported.
The monitoring channels Exilenova+ and Supernova+ named port facilities, oil tankers and a data center as targets. The port houses the Petersburg Oil Terminal, one of Russia's largest facilities for storing and exporting petroleum products, which Ukraine had already struck on July 4. The extent of the damage could not initially be independently verified; the Kyiv Independent said it could not independently confirm the targets and damage.
Kyiv had already continued strikes deep inside Russia. Ukraine's General Staff reported a hit on a drone factory of the manufacturer Roboavia in the Rostov region on Oct. 16; the extent of the damage remained unconfirmed. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin reported more than 100 drones shot down on their way to the capital, according to AP; more than 350 flights at Moscow airports were canceled or delayed, according to media reports.