Hours before Russian President Vladimir Putin’s flagship economic forum opened Wednesday in his hometown of St. Petersburg, Ukrainian drones hit the region, offering a fiery reminder of the war as the Kremlin welcomed international guests including Rodney Mims Cook Jr., who is overseeing President Donald Trump’s planned White House ballroom.
Thick plumes of black smoke rose over the St. Petersburg, widely regarded as Russia’s second-most-important city after Moscow, on Wednesday morning, wafting over the city’s golden-dome churches and busy port.
Putin is scheduled to attend the three-day conference — the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) — and give a keynote address Friday. Often referred to as Russia’s version of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, SPIEF is designed to draw foreign investment and project Russia at its most prosperous.
As the smoke rose over the city’s outskirts, Pulkovo Airport temporarily restricted its airspace, delaying or diverting about 30 flights.
St. Petersburg’s governor, Alexander Beglov, said unspecified “infrastructure objects” had been hit across three districts, while Alexander Drozdenko, governor of the wider Leningrad region, said air defenses had shot down 59 drones overnight.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said drones hit the St. Petersburg Oil Terminal — the latest in a series of drone strikes deep inside Russian territory, which seem to be shifting the balance in the waragainst Moscow.
“Ukraine’s plan for long-range sanctions is being implemented exactly as needed to bring peace closer,” Zelensky wrote, posting footage of an oil depot in flames.
Other targets included military facilities at the Kronstadt naval base near St. Petersburg and a weapons production site in the Tambov region, he said.
A day earlier, Russia launched its latest missile and drone attacks on Ukraine, hitting Kyiv and the central city of Dnipro and killing at least 23 people, according to Ukrainian authorities.
With the war now in its fifth year and no end in sight, both sides have been locked in a broadening aerial campaign. Meanwhile, the Trump administration remains preoccupied with Iran and has put the negotiations over Ukraine on the back burner.
With Russian officials threatening to step up their bombing campaign, Kyiv has been hit by some of the deadliest Russian strikes in months. Russia, in turn, is reeling from Ukrainian attacks on oil refineries that have triggered fuel shortages.
The attendance of Cook, the chairman of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, has been portrayed by Russian officials as representing the first official U.S. delegation to SPIEF after years of boycotts.
Cook has said his participation was approved by the State Department; however, he did not appear to be part of an official delegation appointed by President Donald Trump.
Still, Cook’s appearance suggested warming relations with Washington. “I would say Americans have been absent at this level since around 2017-2018,” Russian presidential aide Yury Ushakov told journalists Tuesday.
Ushakov said Cook will speak at the forum’s Russia-U.S. cultural dialogue session, alongside Valery Gergiev, the director of the Bolshoi and the Mariinsky theaters, and Mikhail Piotrovsky, the general director of the Hermitage Museum, and other speakers.
Gergiev and Piotrovsky have been placed under international sanctions.
Gergiev, a close ally of Putin, lost his post at the Munich Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera and Carnegie Hall in New York cut ties before Canada sanctioned him in June 2025 over his refusal to condemn Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Piotrovsky, who has been linked to Putin since the 1990s, described the Hermitage’s exhibition policy after the invasion as a “special cultural operation” — borrowing from the Kremlin’s euphemism for the war, which it calls a special military operation.
Piotrovsky backed legislation to absorb Ukrainian cultural objects into Russian state museums, prompting the E.U. sanctions in April 2026.
The SPIEF program also features Candace Owens, the right-wing American podcaster who has promoted conspiracy theories about Brigitte Macron, the first lady of France, and Charlie Kirk, the American conservative political activist who was fatally shot in 2025.
Owens was scheduled to speak at a session on “balancing parenthood in a large family with a successful career.”
Also spotted in Russia ahead of the forum were brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate, the online influencers known for their misogynistic views.
Andrew Tate posted a video of the brothers’ arrival at a Moscow airport, where they were greeted with folk songs by a troupe of costumed women. It was unclear if the Tates planned to attend the forum in St. Petersburg.
The Tate brothers, who have dual U.S. and British citizenship, were arrested in 2022 on suspicion of trafficking women to Romania. They have denied the charges. The two are also wanted in Britain.
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