Russian Baltic ports recover from Ukrainian strikes, but residents live with uncertainty

The highway from St. Petersburg to Primorsk stretches a hundred kilometers through a landscape that shifts gradually from resort town to something harder to name. Past Gazprom's Lakhta Centre headquarters, the billboards change. Military recruitment ads appear—first one at the seventy-kilometer mark, promoting contracts with the Unmanned Systems Forces. By the time you reach Primorsk itself, near the Finnish border, the advertisements have become insistent.

Primorsk was once a Finnish fishing village called Koivisto, ceded to the Soviet Union after the Winter War of 1939-1940. A former church in the town centre now houses a local history museum, its courtyard once decorated with memorial plaques bearing the names of Finns killed in that conflict. The plaques are gone now. So are most of the Finnish tourists. The museum staff, who somehow preserved the main exhibition through recent years, are working on a new display about Primorsk's "cosmic past"—a reference to Energomash, the rocket engine manufacturer that, according to museum workers, essentially built the town. Today, the real economic engine is the Primorsk Oil Terminal, a port connected to the Baltic Pipeline System, constructed in 2000 to replace an older Soviet facility in Latvia. By 2009, cargo turnover had peaked and begun to decline. Russia had by then opened another major Baltic port with oil terminals in Ust-Luga, further south.

In late March and early April 2026, Ukrainian drones struck both ports. The attacks caused fires and what officials described as "damage to infrastructure," temporarily disrupting oil exports. Yet within weeks, official figures claimed "unprecedented" growth compared to the previous year—a year when these same ports faced no attacks at all. The contradiction seemed to trouble no one in the official channels. What troubled the people living nearby was something else entirely: the drones kept coming, and the reassurances kept ringing hollow.

In Yermilovo, a village of roughly 600 people located just a kilometer from the oil terminals, residents spoke with a kind of defensive certainty. "We aren't a strategic target," they said. "There's just homes here. They won't hit us." A museum worker echoed the refrain: "A drone flew right by here last night. But the church has survived two wars, and I hope it will hold up now, too." This faith—that Ukrainians, at least, would not deliberately strike civilians—appeared again and again in conversations, a kind of prayer disguised as logic. On March 23rd, at 3:47 a.m., Governor Alexander Drozdenko reported laconically that a fuel tank at Primorsk had been damaged and caught fire. He offered no further detail. Katya, a young mother, remembered the sound: "We heard the drones flying, and then the pops when they were shot down." By 10 a.m., Drozdenko posted reassurances on Telegram—a platform Russia had effectively blocked—while mobile internet was down across the entire Leningrad region. No one in Yermilovo could read his message.

The dock workers became the town's early warning system. When attacks were imminent, they were evacuated to Yermilovo, dropped off outside the Pyaterochka supermarket near residents' homes. That's how locals learned a threat was coming. Oksana, who lived near the port, had learned to read the signs: "Once the evacuation has started and the vehicles start to arrive, that's when you can start being afraid." But the warnings were inconsistent. Sometimes a threat alert came hours after the danger had passed. Sometimes it didn't come at all. On the night of March 23rd, Lidiya Semyonovna was asleep when the explosions woke her. The oil terminal burned not for an hour or two but for a day or two. "I went out into the yard, and you could see the smoke billowing right over our houses," she recalled. The residue from the burning oil lingered for a week and a half—a smell that clung to shoes, that coated cars with black dust. Anton, who had graduated from high school the year before, heard the explosions in his sleep. He wasn't afraid of shelling, he said. Only little kids were. But he wanted to leave anyway. "What else is there to do?" he asked. "There's infrastructure right there, the port. Honestly, the best option is to leave the country completely." Oksana wanted to leave too, but she doubted it would help. "Where can we go?" she asked. "Didn't you see what happened in Kursk? It's every man for himself. It's the fifth year of the war, and we have no bomb shelters. When we ask questions, the administration just smiles sweetly and says, 'What does the war have to do with any of this?' We're living in parallel worlds."

Fifty kilometers south, Ust-Luga presented a different face. The drive from St. Petersburg offered no resorts, no restaurants—just a working-class fringe with potholed highways and billboards advertising seven million rubles to those willing to sign army contracts, a sum that already factored in future "death benefits." Ust-Luga's terminals, also built in the 2000s after the Soviet collapse left Russia without major Baltic ports, had grown into the country's second-largest seaport by cargo turnover, after Novorossiysk. The port employed roughly 30,000 people across oil, coal, grain, and other terminals, though fewer than 2,000 actually lived in the village itself. The attacks began on March 25th, and by March 29th, another fire had broken out. Governor Drozdenko reported both ports still operating. The actual damage remained unknown. Evgeniya, who worked at the port, spoke with bitter sarcasm: "This whole thing is Putin's brainchild. Let him use his head and figure out what to do! Now, they're going to start layoffs." But Kirill, who worked at the coal terminal, wasn't worried. "There are soldiers on duty at the port now," he said. "And what's there to be afraid of at home? They don't hit houses." Marina, who worked at the Magnit supermarket, agreed. A drone fragment had once hit a house in Ust-Luga, but the owners had been paid compensation. The shelling didn't worry her. "I know the air defences will take care of it." She blamed Ukraine's president. "He's a good director, I like his TV series and his movies," she said quietly, glancing around. "But in terms of a president, let's just say the wrong person was put in charge. It bothers him that we have our own wealth. We have oil, we have coal, and we have factories."

What bothered Marina more, it seemed, was the influx of outsiders. Alexey, a retired man who had lived in Ust-Luga his whole life, pointed out license plates from Dagestan, spoke of workers from Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, India, Serbia. "There are more outsiders than locals now," he said. In the Soviet period, the fish processing plant had been the town's core. Alexey had worked there for fifteen years. "Everything here lived off the plant. They built housing and gave out apartments. They even built a community centre." The plant had shut down in the 2000s when the cargo port began construction. The former headquarters now housed shops, but the sign still read "Ust-Luga Fish Factory." "There was a bomb shelter there, by the way," Alexey noted. "Now, you don't even know where to run if something happens. There are no other shelters." When the booming started, he said, people just went outside and watched. "Whatever they decide over there, that's how it will be." When asked where "over there" was, he answered without hesitation: "Well, wherever Zelensky is sitting, probably. Where else?"