A large Ukrainian drone attack on 6 June 2026 struck the Russian Navy's 15th Arsenal, a military ammunition depot near the village of Bolshaya Izhora in the Leningrad Region. Satellite data subsequently confirmed thermal signatures at the site, providing independent corroboration of a strike that Ukrainian officials described as one of the largest against the St. Petersburg area since Russia's full-scale invasion began.
The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) claimed joint responsibility for the attack alongside Ukraine's Defence Forces and HUR, Ukraine's military intelligence directorate. The Insider reported that the SBU said fires and secondary detonations followed the strike on the arsenal's warehouses. According to the SBU, the 15th Arsenal stores missiles and ammunition supporting Russian naval operations in the Baltic Sea. The agency also claimed that separate strikes hit the Kronstadt naval base and an oil depot in Ust-Labinsk in the Krasnodar Region, though the scale of damage at those sites is not known.
NASA's Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) recorded thermal anomalies near the 15th Arsenal on 6 June. The VIIRS instrument aboard the Suomi NPP satellite detected fire radiative power of 6.31 megawatts at the site that day. On 7 June, both Suomi NPP and NOAA-20 satellites registered additional thermal anomaly points near the arsenal, with fire radiative power ranging from 0.37 to 1.79 megawatts. Analysts caution, however, that the data confirms the presence of heat radiation at the location but does not allow assessment of the fire's size or the overall scale of damage.
An open-source intelligence researcher identified as 'blinzka' published a Sentinel-2 false-colour urban mode image from 6 June showing bright thermal signatures on territory along the Primorskoye Highway between Bolshaya Izhora and Lebyazhye, the area where the 15th Arsenal is located. The imagery added a second independent data stream to the NASA readings.
Leningrad Region governor Alexander Drozdenko reported that 141 drones were shot down over the region on 6 June, with debris falling in the Luga, Volosovo, and Lomonosov Districts. Seven people were injured in total: four in the Leningrad Region, including a child, and three in St. Petersburg.
Russia has not publicly acknowledged damage to the 15th Arsenal. That silence follows a pattern documented across previous incidents involving sensitive military or industrial facilities. In 2017, Russian authorities admitted radiation levels of Ruthenium-106 hundreds of times above background near the Mayak nuclear reprocessing plant in the Urals but declined to investigate or identify a source, according to The Independent. In 2019, following an explosion near Severodvinsk that killed at least five nuclear specialists, the government confirmed radionuclide detections while remaining publicly ambiguous about the nature of the incident, as The Guardian reported at the time. Both episodes illustrate a consistent reluctance to acknowledge the scope of damage at strategically sensitive sites.
The precise effect of the 6 June attack on the 15th Arsenal's ammunition stocks — and on Russian naval readiness in the Baltic Sea — remains unknown. The total number of drones launched and how many reached their intended targets has not been confirmed. What satellite data can establish is the fact of fire. What it cannot yet establish is the cost.
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