At 3 a.m. on Sunday, explosions started rolling across St. Petersburg. They didn’t stop until 6.
By sunrise the St. Petersburg Oil Terminal was burning. So were the Ruchyi oil depot and a row of industrial warehouses in the Kolpinsky district. Gov. Alexander Beglov said one person was killed and five were injured.
Russia’s Defense Ministry claimed it downed 1,015 Ukrainian drones overnight across 15 regions, Crimea and the Black Sea. It was one of Kyiv’s largest aerial attacks of the war, and the biggest ever aimed at St. Petersburg.
The terminal can handle up to 12.5 million tons a year. In the surrounding Leningrad region, Gov. Alexander Drozdenko said about 50 apartment buildings, home to roughly 20,000 people, sat in the affected area.
Exactly one week earlier, President Trump had announced an energy ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine. His post ended with a warning. “Do not break it!”
Last Thursday I told you October 18 would be a tell. That was the deadline for the Graham Act tariffs, and whether they landed would show which instinct was winning in Washington.
We got our answer two days early. Then we got a second answer, in flames.
The Tell Arrived on Friday