SAINT PETERSBURG/BRUSSELS: Ukraine fired hundreds of drones at Russia early on Saturday, leaving one person dead and setting an oil depot ablaze on the final day of the country’s flagship economic forum in Saint Petersburg, officials said.
Many of the drones targeted Saint Petersburg itself, the second Ukrainian attack on the city in less than a week, with Ukraine’s SBU security services saying it had hit a naval base.
The strikes come a day after Russian President Vladimir Putin rejected Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky’s proposal for a meeting, drawing criticism from Zelensky, who accused him of “choosing war again”.
Russian air defences intercepted a total of 376 drones over the regions of “Belgorod, Bryansk, Kaluga, Kursk, Leningrad, Novgorod, Oryol, Pskov, Rostov, Ryazan, Smolensk, Tver, and Tula, the Moscow region, Crimea Republic, Abkhazia Republic, and over the waters of the Azov and Black Seas,” the Russian defence ministry said.
Nato bolsters defences around Sweden and Finland
Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, while Abkhazia is a region of Georgia that Russia military occupies. Over 140 drones were shot down over the Leningrad region, which surrounds Saint Petersburg, governor Aleksandr Drozdenko said.
The city’s governor, Alexander Beglov, issued a rare call for residents to stay indoors during the attack.
“Russian air defences prevented any damage. The condition of the three injured is assessed as minor and they have been discharged,” he said. Ukraine’s SBU security services said they had targeted the city’s Kronstadt naval base, as well as “the Russian Navy’s 15th Arsenal in the Leningrad region”.
The attacks also sparked a fire at an oil depot in the southern town of Ust-Labinsk, while drone debris killed a man in the western Tver region, according to local officials. Zelensky described the strikes as a “just response” to Russian aggression against Ukraine. “It is time to end this war. But Russia’s ruler wants to keep fighting.
That is why Ukrainian sanctions against this aggression are working,” he said on X. “Any manifestation of injustice against Ukraine will receive a just response.”
Nordic defence boost
Nato ground forces on Saturday started operations aimed at boosting defences around Sweden and Finland, two of its newest members, the alliance said. Following Russia’s all-out 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the two Nordic countries abandoned decades of military non-alignment to join Nato. Finland entered the alliance in 2023 and Sweden did likewise the following year.
The region around the two countries, part of Nato’s northeastern flank, “is one of the most strategically significant and environmentally challenging areas in the world,” the US general who is Nato’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe, Alexus Grynkewich, said in a statement.
Sweden and Finland lie on the Baltic Sea, the waterway used by Russian warships heading to or from Saint Petersburg or the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.
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