Ukraine hits St. Petersburg with one of the largest drone attacks of the war, setting oil facilities ablaze a week after the energy ceasefire announcement

St. Petersburg is about as far from the front as the war reaches, and on Sunday morning it was burning. Ukrainian drones came in overnight in numbers Russia itself describes as exceptional, and they hit the infrastructure the city runs on: the St. Petersburg oil terminal, the Ruchyi oil depot, industrial warehouses, the logistics hub of the online retailer Ozon, and a data center belonging to VK, the company behind Russia largest social network. VK said its services remained available to users. Ukrainian drone maker Fire Point said the Ukrainian military had struck the VK data center near the city.

The casualty figures come in two frames and both are reported here. Governor Alexander Beglov reported one person killed and five injured in St. Petersburg, a dozen apartment buildings and two houses damaged, and a temporary closure of Pulkovo Airport. Reuters reported the wider toll across the city and the surrounding Leningrad region as one dead and 15 injured, as of October 18. In the region, Governor Alexander Drozdenko said two transformer substations in Yanino were knocked out, affecting roughly 20,000 people. Russia defense ministry said air defenses downed 1,015 Ukrainian drones over Russian regions overnight. That is a ministry claim. It has not been independently verified, and no independent count of drones launched exists.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, quoted by TASS, said Russia is responding with systematic, large scale strikes and that Kyiv is resisting but cannot change the course of events.

The timing is the story inside the story. A week ago President Trump announced that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to stop attacking each other energy infrastructure, a pause meant to ease the pressure on fuel prices before the American midterms. Neither capital acknowledged the agreement in those terms. Ukraine says it halted its strikes on Russian energy targets for several days and then resumed them because Russia never stopped. President Zelensky wrote on X on Sunday that since the American president announced the energy ceasefire a week ago, Russia has deliberately attacked Ukraine energy and oil and gas sectors 76 times. In the 24 hours to Sunday morning, Ukrainian authorities said Russian missile and drone attacks killed eleven people and injured nearly fifty across Ukraine, including a massive attack on energy facilities in the Odesa region, CNN reported.

Zelensky also told Meet the Press, in an interview aired Sunday, that American intelligence sharing with Ukraine has been restored after a blackout of about three days during which Kyiv could not see incoming Russian ballistic missiles. It was blocked for some period of time, and then it was de blocked by the American side, he said. We are very thankful for this. Now it works. The strikes on St. Petersburg came one day after Washington waived the new Russia sanctions, and on the same weekend the administration said it would take up to 60 days to decide whether those sanctions should ever take effect.

The picture with this story is an illustration, not a photograph.