St Petersburg’s oil tanks catch the war

At least one person was killed and five were injured in an overnight attack on St Petersburg that struck two oil facilities, according to the city’s governor, in one of the more consequential attacks on Russia’s second city since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began.

Governor Alexander Beglov said fires were being put out at the St Petersburg Oil Terminal and the Ruchyi oil depot. He also said 12 apartment buildings and two houses were damaged, and that Pulkovo Airport was temporarily closed. Those are the confirmed local claims so far; Kyiv had not commented at the time of the BBC report, so responsibility for the strikes had not been formally acknowledged by Ukraine.

The attack appears to have reached beyond fuel storage. VK, the Russian social network, said a drone targeted one of its regional data centres and that its services remained available after users reported outages. Ozon, one of Russia’s biggest e-commerce companies, said a drone strike caused a fire at its local logistics centre, adding that staff were evacuated and no one there was injured.

That combination matters. Oil terminals are part of the revenue and supply chain Ukraine has said it wants to disrupt. Hitting a logistics hub and a data centre points to a broader effort to put pressure on the machinery of daily commerce as well as the energy sector that helps finance the war.

Russia’s defence ministry said it shot down more than 1,000 Ukrainian drones over Russian territory in the same wave of attacks. That figure could not be independently verified from the information available, but it gives a sense of the scale Russia is claiming.

The strikes landed amid a worsening argument over attacks on energy infrastructure. The BBC reported that Ukraine had paused strikes on Russian oil facilities for three days after Donald Trump announced what he called an “energy ceasefire”, while accusing Russia of continuing to hit Ukrainian energy targets. President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia had targeted Ukraine’s energy sector 76 times since that announcement and later said his teams were still in contact with Trump’s negotiators.

What is clear is simpler, and harder on ordinary people than the diplomatic language suggests: fuel depots burned in St Petersburg, homes were damaged, one person was reported dead, and another front of the war’s infrastructure battle moved deeper into a city far from the main line of fighting.