By Gleb Bryanski
Moscow (Reuters) –ukrainian drones focused on St. Petersburg on Sunday, Russian authorities said, forcing the airport to close five o'clock, because Vladimir Putin marked the Marine Day of Russia in the city, despite the earlier cancellation of its naval parade due to security problems.
St. Petersburg usually has a large-scale television navy parade on the Marine Day, with a fleet of warships and military ships sailing past the Neva River and is attended by Putin.
Last year Russia suspected a Ukrainian plan to attack the parade of the city, according to the state of television.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov confirmed on Sunday that this year's parade had been canceled for safety reasons, after the first reports of the cancellation of the beginning of July.
Putin arrived on Sunday on the historic naval headquarters of the city through the patrol speed boat, from where he followed exercises with more than 150 ships and 15,000 military staff in the Pacific and Arctic and Baltic and Caspian Sea.
“Today we mark this vacation in a working environment, we inspect the fleet of the fleet,” Putin said in a video address.
The Russian Ministry of Defense said that air defenses have lowered a total of 291 Ukrainian drones with fixed wings on Sunday, under a record 524 drones that were brought down on 7 May, prior to the Russian Victory Day Parade on 9 May.
Alexander Drozdenko, governor of the Leningrad region around St. Petersburg, said that more than ten drones were brought down over the area and a woman's declining debris injured a woman. At 0840 GMT on Sunday, Drozdenko said the attack had been repelled.
Pulkovo airport in St. Petersburg was closed during the attack, with 57 flights delayed and 22 diverted to other airports, according to a statement. Pulkovo resumed operations later on Sunday.
The Russian blogger Alexander Yunashev, part of an official group of reporters traveling with Peskov, said that Peskov told him that their flight from Moscow to St. Petersburg was delayed on Sunday due to the drone attack.
(Additional reporting by Anton Kolodyazhnyy; Edit by Alexandra Hudson)
