ST. PETERSBURG — Passengers and staff at Pulkovo Airport were moved to safe locations on Sunday while fire crews worked on blazes at civilian sites in four districts and a fire burned at the city’s oil terminal, after a Ukrainian drone attack that Russian officials say began overnight, TASS reported.
Governor Alexander Beglov said the drones targeted the St. Petersburg Oil Terminal, where a fire broke out, and civilian infrastructure across four city districts, and that there were no casualties. The federal air transport agency, Rosaviatsia, said Pulkovo suspended all arrivals and departures.
The size of the attack depends on who is counting. Leningrad Region Governor Alexander Drozdenko was first quoted at 95 drones shot down, then at 126, and the Kyiv Independent cites him at 127; none of the figures says how many were launched. TASS’s tally of consequences lists debris damage to a private house near Kirovsk, an apartment building in Vsevolozhsk, four parked vehicles in Nizino and power lines, alongside the terminal fire. Ukrainian sources describe hits on energy and data infrastructure. TEH could not independently verify either version.
The Kyiv Independent reported that Ukrainian monitoring channels put the start of the attack at 2:50 a.m. local time and that videos appear to show a drone striking an eight-lane bridge in the city. The newspaper said it could not independently verify the targets or the extent of the damage. TASS does not mention a bridge in its factbox.
Russian tech company VK confirmed a drone attack on its data center in the Leningrad Region and said “VK services remain available to users as usual,” according to TASS. The Kyiv Independent noted that Ukraine has struck multiple Yandex data centers in recent weeks.
The oil terminal sits in the city’s port and is one of Russia’s largest fuel storage and export facilities, with a reported throughput of 12.5 million tons a year, the Kyiv Independent said. It added that Ukraine hit the terminal before, on July 4, and that Ukrainian drone maker Fire Point claimed an FP-1 drone struck it this time. Citing the Russian opposition outlet Astra, the newspaper also reported a power substation hit, blackouts and low water pressure. TASS’s factbox lists only localized outages from debris on power lines and warns that mobile internet in St. Petersburg may be disrupted.
The Kyiv Independent set the strike against what it called the “abject failure” of Donald Trump’s unilaterally imposed energy ceasefire. None of the accounts TEH read says how long Pulkovo’s suspension lasted, whether the terminal is still loading fuel, or whether a bridge was hit.
