00:10A Baltic oil port catches fire. A Kremlin spokesman claims a strategic city has fallen,
00:17and within hours, Ukraine says none of it is true. Welcome to the fourth year of a war that's still
00:24full of surprises. Overnight into July 4th, Russia's second largest city, St. Petersburg,
00:30population 6 million, came under what its own governor called a large-scale drone attack.
00:36Local media reported a fire breaking out at the city's oil terminal, but the real damage happened
00:42further out. In the Leningrad region, drones struck the port of Visatsk, a facility on the Gulf of
00:49Finland that handles oil, grain, coal, and liquefied natural gas. Russia's Leningrad governor
00:55said 72 drones were shot down in that region alone. Nationwide, Russia's defense ministry
01:02claimed it intercepted 389 Ukrainian drones overnight. This wasn't random. Ukraine has
01:09spent this year systematically hammering Russia's energy infrastructure, strikes that have already
01:15triggered fuel shortages in parts of the country. And St. Petersburg isn't new to this. Just weeks
01:21earlier, Ukrainian drones hit the city on the opening day of its own International Economic Forum,
01:27while Vladimir Putin was speaking. The fallout even reached Finland, which imposed temporary aviation
01:33and maritime restrictions over the eastern Gulf of Finland because of the attacks. While drones were
01:39falling on Russian soil, Russia was making its own big announcement about a city 900 miles away.
01:46Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declared that Russian forces had completely taken Kostiantinovka,
01:53a key industrial and transport hub in Ukraine's Donetsk region. Putin called it a strategic achievement,
01:59the first step, he said, towards capturing the larger Slovyansk-Kromatorsk defensive hub.
02:05Today we will take another work meeting, where we will look at the current situation,
02:14which is located in the special military operations zone.
02:19We will look at the last results of the military work.
02:24General Valery Gerasimov went further, claiming Russian troops had also secured full control of
02:31the entire Luhansk region. Big claims, big headlines. Except, Ukraine says it's not true.
02:38Ukraine's general staff flatly rejected the claim, calling it more fake claims, and stated that its
02:44forces are still conducting active defensive operations inside Kostiantinovka and on its approaches.
02:51And it's not just Kyiv pushing back. Independent battlefield trackers, like the Deep State map,
02:57widely used by open-source analysts, reportedly show Russian troops still near the city, not in control
03:04of it. The Institute for the Study of War has even warned that Russia may be using AI-generated video
03:10to fabricate scenes of victory. This isn't the first time, either. Putin previously claimed Kostiantinovka
03:17was about to fall, only for Ukrainian forces to push back the same narrative. So what's really
03:23going on here? Two militaries, two competing stories, both released on the same day. One about a burning
03:30oil port, one about a captured city that apparently hasn't been captured. It's a pattern that's defined
03:36this war. Russia claims territorial winds to project momentum. Ukraine hits Russian energy
03:42infrastructure to bleed the war economy. Both sides fight the ground war and the information war at
03:48the same time. The drones over St. Petersburg are real. The fire at the oil terminal is real. But
03:55whether Kostiantinovka has actually fallen? That's still very much up for debate. And in a war this long,
04:02two, sometimes the hardest thing to capture isn't a city. It's the truth.
04:18Subscribe to OneIndia and never miss an update. Download the OneIndia app now.
Comments