Drones over Saint Petersburg: oil terminal and VK data center hit

A story the morning did not report: a drone attack struck Saint Petersburg and the Leningrad oblast, causing damage to several infrastructures in the region, according to two Russian outlets that covered the event independently.

The regional website Fontanka reports that at 08:41 the authorities had announced the downing of 144 drones over the Leningrad oblast. Still according to Fontanka, a fire in a residential building in the Vsevolozhsk district caused the hospitalization of four people, a woman and three children.

The independent outlet Meduza, which gathered images, videos and local information about the incident, reports damage to the city port’s oil terminal, to the Ruchi depot, to a warehouse of the e-commerce platform Ozon, to the data center of the internet company VK, to an electrical substation and to a cable-stayed bridge. Meduza also reports a toll of one dead and fifteen wounded across the city and the oblast.

The two accounts — Fontanka’s, focused on the number of drones downed and on a specific residential episode, and Meduza’s, which offers a broader picture of the infrastructural damage and the human toll — describe different portions of the same event, with the reported figures not contradicting each other: they concern distinct events and areas within the same affected region.

The list of targets hit, if confirmed in the coming days, outlines an attack that simultaneously touched the energy sector — the oil terminal and the substation — and the digital sector, with VK’s data center, as well as logistics infrastructure such as the Ozon warehouse and a bridge. Neither of the two cited sources is a state body: Fontanka is a regional outlet, Meduza an independent site operating in exile.

At present, no official Russian statements organically confirming the full set of damages reported by Meduza appear in the available excerpts, nor any claims of responsibility for the attack. The toll of one dead and fifteen wounded, reported solely by Meduza for the city and oblast combined, remains for now the only aggregate figure on the human consequences of the episode.