Ukraine's drone strikes have brought the war home to Russia, targeting infrastructure and causing widespread destruction. The strikes have humiliated Putin, who was due to speak at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum. The attacks have also caused terror among residents, who are reaping what Putin has sowed.
In more than four years of war, one may think many Russia ns have become immune to the devastation caused by drone strikes such as the one that hit St Petersburg in the early hours of Wednesday.
Ukrainians are forced to suffer it daily, as are residents of some of the Russian regions that border the country it invaded. But Vladimir Putin's birthplace has seldom heard the ominous buzzing - like a flying lawnmower or a large swarm of bees - before the deafening and often deadly explosions.
On Wednesday, Ukraine was sending the war home to Russia while Putin staged his own grandiose version of the Davos World Economic Forum (the St Petersburg International Economic Forum) amid the spires of the historic city where he grew up. The city's oil terminal went up in flames and a £120million naval corvette vessel was ripped apart in the nearby Kronstadt military base, which headquarters Russia's Baltic Fleet. Across the city, 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. ' St Petersburg's oil terminal went up in flames and a £120million naval corvette vessel was ripped apart in the nearby Kronstadt military base on Wednesday following drone strikes 'I can't sleep.
I found my son with a pillow covering his head to make it go away. What can I say? This is the taste of our own medicine.
' Russians - even those who opposed Putin's war - are now reaping what he has sowed. 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. ' Yet they were, in a sense, fortunate. Yes, they choked on the noxious fumes from the smoke shrouding Russia's former tsarist capital.
But no one was killed, and Ukraine chose military targets - unlike Putin, who cold-bloodedly seeks out Ukrainian civilians in such attacks. The truth is that after months of grinding and bloody attrition in the war, the tide appears to be turning in Ukraine's favour. Massive drone attacks are reaching deeper into Russia to hit vital infrastructure targets, following dramatic improvements in technology and support from the West.
What Putin declared would be a 'three-day special operation' in February 2022 has become a crisis from which the Russian President seems unable to escape. The success of these attacks is becoming increasingly evident to a despairing Russian people despite state-enforced internet and broadcast crackdowns. A month ago, drones were launched at Moscow for three successive days in the run-up to the Victory Day parade celebrating the defeat of the Nazis in the Second World War.
What should have been a showcase of military might was scaled down to a shadow of the great parades of the past. Also in the past month, Ukraine has used its new domestically produced missile and drone capability to wreak havoc on Russian oil refineries (one has been destroyed or badly savaged every two days), with catastrophic consequences for the economy.
One recent hit was a big facility in Feodosia, in Russian-occupied Crimea, deepening a rapidly growing crisis in this tourist mecca, caused by constant attacks. Meanwhile, a hit on another port, Tuapse, triggered pollution that has contaminated vast stretches of coastline, making the Black Sea a more literal name. Bathers emerge from the water with their bodies smeared in oil.
'My children's skin is patched in black from playing on the beach,' says Tatiana, 37, who is holidaying there. 'Yet they tell us it's safe as the summer begins. ' The pollution has even reached the beaches around Putin's £1billion clifftop palace at Gelendzhik, with multiple underground floors, including a bunker, and likened to the lair of a James Bond villain. It was originally designed with a striptease stage and pole-dancing hookah hall.
A plume of black smoke is seen over the port of St Petersburg on Wednesday His secret children with the 43-year-old Olympic gymnast, Alina Kabaeva - Vladimir, seven, and Ivan, 11, who are educated by governesses from Britain and other Nato states despite the war - may find the oil a serious hazard if they spend their summer holidays there
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