Residents of St. Petersburg were told to stay inside on Saturday morning after a large-scale Ukrainian drone attack reached the city, as officials warned of possible disruptions to mobile internet service and reported three minor injuries.
City governor Alexander Beglov told people not to go outside. Regional governor Alexander Drozdenko said 141 drones were shot down over the surrounding Leningrad region, while Russia's Defense Ministry said its air defenses intercepted 376 Ukrainian drones overall. The scale of the attack put a new burden on a city that had already been hit days earlier, when a Ukrainian drone strike set ablaze an oil terminal and damaged a nearby naval base before the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum opened.
The overnight strike also sharpened a wider message from Kyiv. Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukrainian drones had covered about 1,000 kilometers to reach the St. Petersburg region and hit the enemy navy's arsenals and a base in Kronstadt, while also striking an oil depot in Russia's southern Krasnodar region. His claim was not independently confirmed in the available facts, but it underlined how far Ukraine's long-range attacks have reached as the war grinds on with the front line barely moving.
The clash comes a day after Vladimir Putin said he saw no point in meeting Zelenskyy face to face, after the Ukrainian leader's first public direct message to him since Russia sent troops into Ukraine in 2022. On Saturday, Ukrainian official Andrii Sybiha said things would only get worse for Russia and that there are no safe places in Russia exempt from Ukrainian long-range attacks. That leaves St. Petersburg with a familiar problem and a harder one: the city can expect more pressure from drones, but the next strike may test whether Russia's promised air-defense buildup is enough to keep them out.
