Russia just lost its biggest Baltic port to another Ukrainian drone strike
1 day ago · 11 November 2026Share
NASA FIRMS thermal imagery from January 4, 2025 shows heat signatures at Ust-Luga. Imagery from LANCE FIRMS operated by NASA's Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS) with funding provided by NASA Headquarters. · Public domain
Ukrainian drones just hit Ust-Luga.
That's Russia's biggest port on the Baltic Sea.
It happened a few hours ago, overnight, in Russia's Leningrad region.
There's a big fire burning. A transformer station is down.
Alexander Drozdenko runs that region as governor. He says three port workers got hurt. He posted that on his own Telegram channel.
And NASA just confirmed the fire independently. Its satellite fire-tracker, FIRMS, picked up heat coming off the port, a timber terminal, and a fish plant nearby.
So why does this port matter so much?
Ust-Luga is Russia's biggest port on the Baltic and its second-biggest port overall. It ships out oil and fuel. Some of that fuel moves on the shadow fleet — tankers Russia uses to dodge Western sanctions.
It's also where a major pipeline ends, the Baltic Pipeline System-2. And it's home to a NOVATEK fuel plant that handles around 8 million tonnes of material a year.
Five governments have already sanctioned this port. The EU. Canada. Britain. America. Switzerland.
And the strike set off alarms across the whole Baltic.
Estonia's military issued air threat alerts for six counties at around 3:15am. Fifteen minutes later, it added two more counties. The alert got lifted around 5:30am.
One resident in Kohtla-Järve said NATO jets were flying overhead, again and again, at short intervals.
Latvia and Lithuania put out their own drone warnings too. One covered Kaunas — a city of around 300,000 people. Both got withdrawn the same morning.
Finland shut parts of its airspace and waters over the eastern Gulf of Finland. It called that a precaution. It lifted the restrictions later too.
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The Baltic Sea and its nine bordering countries are shown in this satellite image. File photo. Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA GSFC · Public domain
People in Estonia reported seeing the fire from across the border — from the towns of Narva, Sinimäe and Sillamäe. That's according to Estonia's public broadcaster, ERR.
And here's the thing. This isn't the first time Ust-Luga has been hit.
Ukrainian drones struck the same port before, damaging equipment at its NOVATEK facility. When exactly is unclear — one report says mid-August, another says early September. Either way, this is at least the second confirmed strike on this port this year.
It fits a bigger pattern. Since late October, strikes have knocked out nine of Russia's 35 major oil refineries. That's according to Reuters reporting, cited by the Kyiv Independent. Around 300,000 tonnes of daily refining capacity is affected. That's roughly 30 per cent of everything Russia refines.
Two days before this strike, a Ukrainian drone hit the Kirishi oil refinery. That's also in Leningrad region, and it's Russia's second-biggest refinery. A woman was killed nearby, in Vsevolozhsk, when drone debris fell on her apartment building.
Drozdenko says his air defences shot down 150 drones over the region overnight, and he's tying that number to this attack. He'd separately said 146 drones were downed the day before.
But here's the catch. Russia routinely overstates how well its air defences work. Neither number has been independently checked.
Ukraine has not officially said anything about this strike.
Now the timing. This happened while America was hosting the first direct Russia-Ukraine talks in nine months, in Abu Dhabi. Those talks are now on their second and final day.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine's president, called the first day of talks constructive and quite substantive.
So Ukraine is talking peace in one city, while its drones hit an energy port 4,000 kilometres away. That's military pressure and diplomacy running side by side, not one instead of the other.
Russia hasn't stayed still either. TASS reported Ukrainian forces fired at least 31 artillery shells into Russian-occupied Donetsk overnight, wounding three civilians. A separate Russian strike knocked out power in parts of Kryvyi Rih and injured people in Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia. Those reports haven't been independently confirmed yet.
So what don't we know?
How much damage actually got done. It's possible tankers were hit too, but there's no independent confirmation of damage to any vessel. And it's still not clear whether oil loadings at the port were disrupted at all.
So a Baltic port that five Western governments have already sanctioned is on fire. A transformer station is down. And nobody — not Ukraine, not Russia, not anyone watching from space — has said yet what this will actually cost.
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