Ukraine hit a Russian military base and other targets near St. Petersburg with a barrage of long-range drones early Saturday, just hours after President Vladimir V. Putin, addressing an important annual economic forum in the city, rejected a peace overture by his Ukrainian counterpart.
The Russian authorities called the attack “unprecedented,” with Gov. Aleksandr Drozdenko of the Leningrad region around the city announcing that more than 140 drones had been shot down. The attack ignited a fire at an unspecified military facility, causing “insignificant” damage and the evacuation of some residents, he said.
In an unusual move since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the city’s governor, Alexander Beglov, urged residents to shelter indoors.
Falling drone debris from an attack elsewhere, in the Tver region, killed a man, while three people were injured in the St. Petersburg area, officials said. Mr. Beglov described the injuries as “minor” and said that Russian air defenses had prevented any serious damage.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, writing on X, stressed the distance that the drones had flown, about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles), to strike a naval base at Kronstadt, on an island just west of St. Petersburg, as well as a naval arsenal.
“It is time to end this war,” Mr. Zelensky said in his post. “But Russia’s ruler wants to keep fighting.”
Russia unleashed its own barrage of scores of long-range drones against various targets on Saturday, Ukrainian officials said.
The Ukrainian drone strike on St. Petersburg was the second such attack in four days. Black smoke from a burning oil facility billowed on Wednesday over the western edge of the city just as the country’s business elites were gathering for the annual St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.
While the forum was once a magnet for major Western investors, those investors have largely stayed away since the war began, although Russia said that 130 countries were represented this year. The United States sent an official representative for the first time in years, a low-level cultural delegation.
In conjunction with the forum’s start, Mr. Zelensky had released a letter to Mr. Putin suggesting that the two meet in person to try to reach a peace agreement. The letter was written in a slightly mocking tone, noting that Mr. Putin had already spent about half his over two decades as Russia’s leader fighting Ukraine. The Ukrainian leader was counting from 2014, when Russia seized Crimea and fostered a separatist movement in the country’s east.
At the forum on Friday, Mr. Putin rejected the overture, calling the letter “rude” and saying that the war would end only when Russia’s goals were met. Although the Kremlin has abandoned its initial objective of seizing all of Ukraine, Russia officially annexed four eastern provinces, only one of which it fully controls. The war has basically deadlocked, with Russian advances stalling again in recent weeks.
Mr. Zelensky had also said that with President Trump and the United States concentrating on ending the war against Iran, it would be “wrong to simply wait” for Washington to return its focus to Ukraine.
Constant Méheut contributed reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine.
Neil MacFarquhar has been a Times reporter since 1995, writing about a range of topics from war to politics to the arts, both internationally and in the United States.
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