Ukraine fired hundreds of drones at Russia early Saturday, leaving one person dead and setting an oil depot ablaze on the final day of the country's flagship economic forum in St. Petersburg, officials said.
Many of the drones targeted St. Petersburg itself, the second Ukrainian attack on the city in less than a week, with Ukraine's SBU security service saying it had hit a naval base.
Moscow and Kyiv have intensified drone strikes on each other in recent months as U.S.-led diplomatic efforts to end the war, now in its fifth year, remain stalled and sidetracked by the war in the Middle East.
The strikes come a day after Russian President Vladimir Putin rejected Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky's proposal for a meeting, drawing criticism from Zelensky, who accused him of "choosing war again."
Russian air defenses intercepted a total of 376 drones over the regions of "Belgorod, Bryansk, Kaluga, Kursk, Leningrad, Novgorod, Oryol, Pskov, Rostov, Ryazan, Smolensk, Tver and Tula, the Moscow region, the republic of Crimea, the republic of Abkhazia, and over the waters of the Azov and Black Seas," the Russian Defense Ministry said.
