Drone attack on Ust-Luga: 37 UAVs reported in Leningrad Region
On the night of 14 August, drones attacked the Leningrad region. The region’s governor, Oleksandr Drozdhenko, reported that 37 drones had been shot down and that damage had been caused in the area around the port of Ust-Luga.
This was reported by Censor.NET, citing Russian media.
However, the official did not specify which particular facility near Ust-Luga had been damaged or the extent of the damage.
What is the port of Ust-Luga?
Ust-Luga is a major commercial seaport in the Leningrad Oblast of the Russian Federation, situated on the shores of the Luzhskaya Bay of the Gulf of Finland in the Baltic Sea, approximately 100 km west of St Petersburg.
It is not a single terminal, but a large port complex comprising numerous specialised terminals. The Russian company ‘Rosmorport’ explicitly lists the terminals for various types of cargo within the complex and continues to expand the port’s territory and infrastructure.
The port has a very broad scope of operations:
- oil and petroleum products;
- coal;
- liquefied natural gas (LNG);
- liquefied hydrocarbon gases;
- mineral fertilisers;
- timber;
- general and bulk cargo;
- containers and other cargo.
For example, the official register of port terminals lists a throughput capacity of up to 12 million tonnes per year for the coal terminal. The oil terminals operate separately. One of them has a quay frontage of over 1 km and is designed for the transhipment of petroleum products.
Ust-Luga has become particularly important since Russia began redirecting exports away from European ports and reducing its dependence on St Petersburg. In effect, the port enables Russia to export energy resources and other strategic cargoes by sea directly from the Baltic coast.
According to industry analysis, in January 2026, Ust-Luga accounted for 47.4 per cent of cargo turnover in the Baltic basin – in other words, almost half.
