Ukraine drones strike St Petersburg oil terminal Vysotsk port deep July 4
Ukraine has shown it can now reach St. Petersburg. In the early hours of July 4 its drones struck oil-export infrastructure in Russia's second-largest city and the Baltic port of Vysotsk, targets roughly 850 km from the border, Zelensky confirmed. Russia said it downed 72 drones.
Ukraine has underlined how far its long-range drone campaign can now reach. In the early hours of July 4, Ukrainian drones struck oil-export infrastructure in St. Petersburg, Russia's second-largest city, along with military targets near Kronstadt and the Baltic port of Vysotsk, a facility that handles oil, coal, grain and liquefied natural gas. President Zelensky, who confirmed the operation on Telegram, put the targets at roughly 850 kilometres from the Ukrainian border. Russian officials described the assault as large-scale and said air defences shot down 72 drones across the city and the surrounding Leningrad region. The choice of targets is the point worth noting: Kyiv has increasingly concentrated its deep strikes on the oil and energy sites that generate the export revenue funding Moscow's war, rather than on symbolic targets. For Russia, the significance is less about the immediate damage than about geography. A city on the Gulf of Finland, long treated as far behind the front, is now demonstrably within range, which forces harder decisions about where to position air defences that are already stretched.