St Petersburg attack hits oil terminal as truce frays

A large Ukrainian drone strike on Russia’s second city set oil facilities ablaze on Sunday, and the St Petersburg attack killed one person. 

Governor Alexander Beglov said five more people went to hospital. Fires burned at the oil terminal, an oil depot called Ruchyi, and industrial warehouses in the Kolpinsky district.

Ukrainian monitoring channels said the raid began around 2:50 a.m. Explosions lit the sky above a city of 5.6 million people.

Damage after the St Petersburg attack

Beglov said 12 apartment blocks and two houses suffered damage. Authorities also limited flights at Pulkovo airport overnight, and crews fought blazes into the morning.

Eyewitness footage showed drones over the city as air defence systems fired, while large explosions lit the night sky.

Russian state media reported that drones struck a data center owned by the social network VKontakte. Retailer Ozon said its logistics centre took a hit as well.

Leningrad region governor Alexander Drozdenko said air defences brought down 144 Ukrainian drones, though a later count from his office put the figure at 127. State media described the strike as the biggest on the city since the war began in 2022.

A hit on a substation cut power for 20,000 people in Yanino. A woman and three children needed treatment for carbon monoxide after debris set a house on fire.

Why the terminal matters

The oil terminal is one of the largest fuel storage and export hubs in Russia. Its yearly throughput reaches about 12.5 million tons, arriving and leaving by river, rail and road.

Fire Point, a Ukrainian drone maker, claimed its FP-1 attack drone hit the facility. Nobody could independently verify the targets or how much damage the raid caused.

A truce that never held

The St Petersburg attack followed an energy ceasefire that Trump declared last week. Neither side said it had agreed beforehand, and the truce collapsed quickly.

Moscow kept hitting Ukraine’s power grid, so Kyiv went back to striking Russian refineries. Trump is angry about those raids, which he says push up fuel prices.

By Zelensky’s count, Russia had attacked Ukrainian energy, oil and gas sites 76 times in the days since Trump’s declaration. Kyiv accused Moscow of breaking the ceasefire dozens of times and said the strikes left tens of thousands of people without power. Strikes on Sunday alone hit substations in four Ukrainian regions.

Two people died at an agricultural business in the western Volyn region, he added. He urged more pressure on Moscow.

“America should see that Russia is not taking any reciprocal steps,” he said, as he spoke about sanctions relief and other agreements.

Zelensky also noted that Trump had blocked a new sanctions package aimed at Russia’s energy and defence sectors.

Kyiv argues that hitting Russian energy sites is fair retribution for years of Russian attacks on Ukraine’s own infrastructure.

For now, the St Petersburg attack shows how far the energy truce has drifted from reality, as both sides keep trading blows on each other’s fuel networks.