On Wednesday, Ukraine sent the war home to Putin’s birthplace to feel the ominous buzzing of the war.
The city’s oil terminal went up in flames and a £120million naval corvette vessel (the Boykiy) was ripped apart in the nearby Kronstadt military base, which headquarters Russia’s Baltic Fleet.
Across the city, people are now in panic, fear and anger as fires broke out as infrastructure targets were hit.
The irony of the forum’s slogan, ‘the pathway to a stable future’, was not lost on its 20,000 delegates from more than 130 countries, as a huge column of smoke from the blazing St Petersburg oil refinery – supplier of energy to Putin’s war machine – hung over the city.
It was a shocking humiliation for the president, who was due to speak at the conference, and terrifying for residents.
‘We’ve been bombed for the last two hours,’ Vika, 45 and a friend of mine, messaged me during the onslaught from Ukraine’s long-range ‘Liutyi’ (‘fierce’) drones. ‘Luckily my parents are further away, so they didn’t hear much.’
One woman cowering in her bathroom was cut by splinters of glass from an explosion hundreds of yards away. ‘Panic, terror,’ summed up a male resident regarding this week’s events.
‘We thought we were safe, being some 600 miles away from Ukraine.’
Massive drone attacks are reaching deeper into Russia to hit vital infrastructure targets, following dramatic improvements in technology and support from the West.
