Governor Says Drones Hit Russia’s Ust-Luga Port Zone, Injuring Three Workers

Leningrad Oblast Governor Alexander Drozdenko said several drones struck the Ust-Luga port zone in Kingisepp District overnight into Wednesday, November 11, starting a fire and injuring three workers. He said the workers' lives were not in danger. In his first report, posted at about 6 a.m. Moscow time, Drozdenko said firefighting crews had begun tackling the blaze and that a transformer substation in Ust-Luga had shut down in an emergency. When he lifted the drone alert just over an hour later, he wrote that "the target of the attack was the Ust-Luga port zone" and gave a preliminary count of 150 drones downed over the region during the night. Neither post said which facility in the port zone had caught fire. Russia's Defence Ministry said air defences intercepted and destroyed 627 Ukrainian drones overnight over more than 20 regions, among them the Leningrad, Smolensk and Moscow regions, as well as Crimea and the Sea of Azov. In Smolensk Oblast, Governor Vasily Anokhin said 37 drones were destroyed and that debris struck a multi-storey building in the town of Yartsevo and set it on fire. "Two people died," Anokhin wrote, adding that emergency workers rescued 10 people from the fire zone and that a temporary shelter had been set up for the building's residents. Ukraine's General Staff has said in earlier statements that its forces struck the Novatek-Ust-Luga complex at Slobodka in Leningrad Oblast on August 14 and again on September 1, reporting a fire at the site on both occasions.