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Akbar Novruz

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The consequences of the war in Ukraine are increasingly being felt inside Russia, with residents of St Petersburg reporting the smell of burning oil drifting into urban areas following Ukrainian drone strikes on key oil infrastructure, AzerNEWS reports via Al Jazeera.

A local resident, identified as Konstantin, said he has intermittently noticed strong odors—ranging from diesel fumes to burning plastic—over the past two weeks. The scent is believed to be linked to fires triggered by Ukrainian drone attacks on Russia’s крупнейшие Baltic oil terminals.

According to the International Energy Agency, the targeted facilities handle a significant share of Russia’s seaborne oil exports and play a role in global energy supply.

The attacks are part of Kyiv’s broader strategy to strike oil infrastructure deep inside Russia, including more than a dozen refineries, with the aim of reducing Moscow’s energy revenues amid ongoing geopolitical tensions.

Key terminals at Ust-Luga and Primorsk—located on opposite sides of the Gulf of Finland—have been repeatedly targeted. These facilities serve as major transit hubs for oil transported from regions such as the Volga, the Ural Mountains, and western Siberia.

Reports indicate that long-range drones have traveled over 1,000 kilometers from Ukrainian territory to hit storage tanks and shipping infrastructure, sparking large-scale fires that have burned for days.

“I never thought it would come to this, that the war would be in the air around me,” Konstantin told Al Jazeera.

“Once again, we were fooled about why we’d gone to war and about the government’s ability to protect us,” says Konstantin, who has had nightmares about the nuclear war scare of the early 1980s as a child. He also remembers the Afghan-Soviet conflict and post-Soviet Russia’s wars in Chechnya.

The smell signalled the sharpest fall of Russia’s Baltic oil exports since 2022, when Moscow began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and has already cost Moscow $1bn, Bloomberg reported on March 31.

While the Primorsk port mostly handles crude oil, Ust-Luga boasts a colossal complex of oil-processing facilities and export terminals that appear damaged and blackened by fire in satellite images.