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SAINT PETERSBURG/BRUSSELS: Ukraine fired hundreds of drones at Russia early on Saturday, leaving one person dead and setting an oil depot ablaze on the final day of the country’s flagship economic forum in Saint Petersburg, officials said.

Many of the drones targeted Saint Petersburg itself, the second Ukrainian attack on the city in less than a week, with Ukraine’s SBU security services saying it had hit a naval base.

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 defences 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, Crimea Republic, Abkhazia Republic, and over the waters of the Azov and Black Seas,” the Russian defence ministry said.