Ukraine just hit Russia's biggest oil terminal after a record Moscow drone barrage
1 hour ago · 18 October 2026Share
S-400 missile system launch vehicle. File photo. Vyacheslav Argenberg · CC BY 4.0
Ukraine just hit one of Russia's biggest oil export terminals.
Plus a data centre. Plus a bridge. All in St Petersburg, overnight.
And it happened just hours after Russia sent a record 512 drones towards Moscow.
So let's start with St Petersburg.
One person is dead. Five more are hurt. That's according to the city's governor, Alexander Beglov.
Fires broke out at the St Petersburg Oil Terminal, the Ruchyi oil depot, and warehouses in the Kolpinsky District.
And that oil terminal is not some small site. It's one of Russia's biggest fuel storage and export facilities. It handles around 12.5 million tonnes a year.
Ukrainian monitoring channels say the attack kicked off around 2:50am local time. A Ukrainian drone maker called Fire Point says its FP-1 attack drone hit the terminal.
Now, the data centre. It belongs to VK, the Russian social media company. VK says drones hit its data centre in the Leningrad region. But VK says its services kept running normally for users anyway.
There's more. Russian e-commerce company Ozon says its logistics hub in St Petersburg caught fire too. And Pulkovo Airport, the one serving the city, had to stop flights during the attack.
Then there's the bridge. A Russian opposition outlet called Astra says the bridge over the Korabelny Fairway was hit. That's about 4.5 kilometres from the oil terminal. Astra also says a power substation was hit, causing blackouts and low water pressure, and that an apartment building was damaged.
None of that from Astra has been independently confirmed. Worth knowing.
Now, how many drones did Russia actually shoot down? This is where it gets messy.
Alexander Drozdenko, the governor of Leningrad Oblast, gave a number for drones shot down over the region. But different reports from the same two days give four different numbers — 126, 127, 144 and 145. Nobody can say which one is right.
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Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data showing the Gulf of Finland with St. Petersburg at its far eastern end. File photo. Jacques Descloitres, MODIS Rapid Response Team, NASA/GSFC · Public domain
Russia's Defence Ministry has its own bigger number. It says air defences shot down 1,015 Ukrainian drones overall, across Russian regions, Crimea and the Black Sea, between 8pm two nights ago and 8am this morning, Moscow time.
So why does any of this matter? Because St Petersburg is Russia's second-biggest city. 5.6 million people live there. It's 856 kilometres from the Ukrainian border.
And its oil terminal has been hit before. Ukraine struck it once already, about three and a half months ago.
Now, back to Moscow. Hours before the St Petersburg attack, Russia sent its own record barrage the other way.
Moscow's mayor, Sergey Sobyanin, says 512 drones were heading for the Moscow region in the 24 hours up to 8:30 this morning. Most were destroyed far from the capital. 127 were intercepted near Moscow itself.
And Russia says it was hit too, the same night, somewhere else. Its Defence Ministry says Russian forces fired 180 drones and one Iskander-M ballistic missile at Ukraine overnight. Ukraine's air force says 152 of those were shot down or stopped.
So both countries sent drones at each other's biggest cities on the same night. And both sides are giving numbers the other side hasn't confirmed.
Here's where this sits. About a week ago, Donald Trump, the US President, announced that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to an energy ceasefire. He gave no details of what it actually covered.
Ukraine has confirmed it paused strikes on Russian oil sites for three days to test that ceasefire. Then it started hitting them again.
Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine's President, told the Financial Times that Kyiv has had enough and will keep hitting Russian energy sites for as long as Russia keeps hitting Ukraine's power grid.
So that's Ukraine's own President saying the ceasefire didn't hold, and that these strikes are a direct answer to Russia's attacks on Ukraine's grid.
What we still don't know: how badly the oil terminal and the VK data centre are actually damaged. Whether the bridge still works. And the real number of drones shot down over Leningrad Oblast.
Russia hasn't denied Ukraine carried out the St Petersburg attack. Ukraine hasn't officially confirmed or denied hitting the exact sites Russian officials named.
Both countries are now trading record-sized drone barrages. Less than a week after a ceasefire neither side actually kept.
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