our weekly newsletter <\/a>for exclusive and original coverage from ITV News. Direct to your inbox every Friday morning. <\/p>\nResidents of the city were told not to leave their homes on Saturday following the strike, with Governor Alexander Beglov warning of disruptions to mobile internet services. <\/p>\n
Three people sustained minor injuries in the attack, Beglov said, and no casualties were reported. <\/p>\n
Regional governor Alexander Drozdenko said 141 drones had been shot down over the surrounding Leningrad region in an “unprecedented attack”, while Russia’s defence ministry said its air defences shot down 376 Ukrainian drones. <\/p>\n
“It is time to end this war. But Russia\u2019s ruler wants to keep fighting,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote on X on Saturday, sharing footage of the strike’s aftermath. <\/p>\n
\u201cLast night, our drones covered a distance of about 1,000 kilometers to the St. Petersburg region \u2014 to the enemy navy\u2019s arsenals and a base in Kronstad.”<\/p>\n
Zelenskyy said the drones had also hit an oil depot in Russia’s southern Krasnodar region.<\/p>\n
The attacks are the latest blow to Russian President Vladimir Putin\u2019s efforts to cast the conflict as a distant event that doesn\u2019t affect Russian daily life.A Ukrainian drone strike set ablaze an oil terminal in the city and hit a nearby naval base Wednesday, hours before the opening of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, Putin\u2019s annual showcase for investment.On Friday, the Russian president rejected a proposal by Zelenskyy for a face-to-face meeting on the four-year conflict, saying he sees \u201cno point\u201d in it. <\/p>\n
A plume of black smoke is seen over the port of St. Petersburg, Russia, on Wednesday after a Ukrainian drone attack Credit: AP<\/p>\n
In an open letter posted on Thursday, Zelenskyy had acknowledged shifting US priorities, saying it would be wrong to simply wait for the Trump administration to turn its focus back to ending the war in Ukraine amid the conflict in Iran.<\/p>\n
“When you came to power in Russia more than 26 years ago, many people in Ukraine viewed you positively. That is how it was. But that is now in the past,” Zelenskyy wrote to Putin. <\/p>\n
“Now, the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians view it positively that our long-range drones paid a visit to the opening of your forum in St. Petersburg, covering a distance of more than 1,000 kilometres.<\/p>\n
“As you know very well, that distance is not the limit of our capabilities.”<\/p>\n
Responding to Putin’s refusal to meet, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said things would \u201conly get worse for Russia” in a post on X on Saturday.<\/p>\n
“Battlefield losses will continue to grow. Failures will get more humiliating,” Sybiha said.<\/p>\n
“The economy will plunge deeper into recession. More jobs will be lost, taxes will be growing, and inflation will hit those most vulnerable.”There are already no safe places in Russia that can be exempt from Ukraine\u2019s long-range sanctions. But their intensity will continue to grow.”<\/p>\n
Russia’s defence \u200bministry said on \u200bSaturday \u200cit \u200bhad captured Shevchenko, a settlement in Ukraine’s Kharkiv \u200cregion, according to \u200cstate media RIA Novosti. In Ukraine, one person was killed and three wounded overnight into Saturday in the Dnipropetrovsk region, as Russian forces struck three districts nearly 30 times with drones and artillery, regional head Oleksandr Hanzha said.In Zaporizhzhia, seven people sought medical care after a Russian drone strike started a fire at a parking lot, according to regional head Ivan Fedorov.Russia targeted Ukraine overnight with 272 strike drones, and air defenses shot down 249 of them, the Ukrainian air force said Saturday.<\/p>\n
Reporting History sees journalists join News At Ten anchor Tom Bradby<\/a> to revisit their remarkable on-the-day reports of the defining events of the modern age. Listen to the episodes below… <\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Prime Minister will host Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz at No. 10 to discuss ongoing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":625477,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-625476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=625476"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625476\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/625477"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=625476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=625476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=625476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}