Manila, Philippines – The Ukrainian Defense Forces (ZSU) and the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) have commemorated the 82nd anniversary of the historic World War II Allied 6 June 1944 D-Day invasion of occupied France by striking a Russian Navy (VMF) arsenal in the settlement of Velyka Izhora in the Leningrad Region. This location is roughly 31 miles southwest of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s hometown of St. Petersburg.
The successful attack was first reported by the Dossye Shpiona (the Spy’s Dossier) Telegram channel, not long after it occurred. According to information at the time, the attack on Military Unit 55443-LI was conducted with a strike package of 40 long-range drones, eight of which reported to have reached the target. This arsenal is one of the major ammunition depots of the VMF’s Baltic Fleet.
Putin in Briefing. Image Credit: Russian Government.
The attack took place on the last day of Putin’s St. Petersburg 3-6 June International Economic Forum, a vanity project that the former KGB Lt. Col. has unilaterally declared to be the “Russian Davos”. This in reference to the famous annual Swiss economic forum that attracts most of the world’s business and finance industry luminaries.
Ukraine has made a point of hitting targets in the region of Russia’s Second City for the purpose of embarrassing the Kremlin – a point not gone unnoticed by the world’s media. “Putin’s annual cash grab gets off to a humiliating start,” read the headline posted by the US outlet Daily Beast.
A Plume of Black Smoke
The BBC’s Steve Rosenberg, the dean of the Moscow press corps, reported how Ukraine’s drone army was the real star of the St. Petersburg event this year.
“Ukrainian drones attacked the St Petersburg area on the opening – and closing – days of the set-piece International Economic Forum (SPIEF),” he writes.
“The abiding image of SPIEF 2026 will be the huge plume of thick black smoke which dominated the St Petersburg skyline on Wednesday. Without specifying what was hit, local officials admitted that drones had damaged ‘infrastructure’. All the delegates saw the smoke as they arrived at the expo center on the edge of the city.”
As Rosenburg and many others now are concluding, inside the hall of this event, Putin could still present the veneer of a strong and capable leader.
But this attempt at buttressing his image is contradicted by what is happening outside – namely, the series of attacks on his birthplace by a Ukrainian army that now launches those strikes with impunity from over 1000 miles away.
Putin in 2025 Russian State Media Image
These drone strikes and the war in general are also inflicting irreparable damage on more than just Putin’s image.
Reporters asking questions of the Russian participants during the forum in the sidebar encounters have elicited some unhappy answers. While no one of high enough status within the Russian political ecosphere was willing to be quoted by name, certain phrases and descriptions were used more than once by different personages.
The Military Spending Burden and Destroyed Ammunition
Runaway military spending has caused economic growth to stall or even begin to shrink across most sectors of the economy. Within the last ten days, Russia’s Finance Minister has submitted an official letter that raises red flags about the current and future hardships to be visited on Russia due to the cost of the war.
The letter was reportedly seen by the Reuters news agency, prompting a US former intelligence official now in retirement to point out that “what no one has explained is how such a letter and its contents were leaked to a Western news outlet. That’s a new – and unheard of – act of dissident activity in Putin’s Russia.”
This is why Russian economists now speak of “stagnation” and, in some areas, “decline” of the nation’s situation. They express growing concern that the war in Ukraine is consuming vast amounts of resources – both in personnel and finances.
Adding to those military spending woes is the 6 June strike on Velyka Izhora. The Ukrainian drones that evaded Russia’s air defense hit the facility’s above-ground hangar-type storage facilities and immediately set off the detonation of stored ammunition in these buildings.
Putin’s military is now reported to have lost approximately 5,000 tons of materiel, mainly artillery shells and ammunition of various calibers, plus engineering munitions. All of this will have to be replaced at a time when Russia is unable to produce enough of its own ammunition and has been forced to source it from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and elsewhere.
Putin in August 2025. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
The average logistics officer looking at this incident is now asking how the Russians could have been so complacent (if not stupid) as to store this ammunition in vulnerable buildings rather than in hardened, subterranean bunkers.
The answer is partly due to the never-ending arrogance of Moscow’s military planners, who inexplicably believe that this facility is unreachable by Ukraine’s drone army. The arsenal was designed as a fortified complex with underground infrastructure and, during the Soviet period, served as a key node in the Baltic Fleet’s ammunition storage system.
Another is that the facility is described as a “Soviet-era throwback” that was being dismantled. The Ukrainian open-source intelligence site Dnipro OSINT later published satellite imagery after the attack showing the signs of detonation across an area of 50,000 square meters.
About the Author: Reuben F. Johnson
Reuben F. Johnson has thirty-six years of experience analyzing and reporting on foreign weapons systems, defense technologies, and international arms export policy. Johnson is the Director of Research at the Casimir Pulaski Foundation. He is also a survivor of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He worked for years in the American defense industry as a foreign technology analyst and later as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Defense, the Departments of the Navy and Air Force, and the governments of the United Kingdom and Australia. In 2022-2023, he won two awards in a row for his defense reporting. He holds a bachelor’s degree from DePauw University and a master’s degree from Miami University in Ohio, specializing in Soviet and Russian studies. He lives in Warsaw.
