A Russian Federation (RF) ammunition dump near the Ukrainian border blew up spectacularly and burned furiously for hours on Tuesday evening, March 29. RF officials said the incident could have been an accident, while Ukrainian independent media said a long-range missile was the cause.
The munitions depot outside the village Kransniy Oktyabr, outside the city Belgorod, blew up after nightfall. A huge explosion showered surrounding fields more than a kilometer distant with debris, and threw billowing smoke and flames hundreds of meters into the air, social media video from the scene showed.
Ukraine’s authoritative censor.net.ua news platform said a Ukraine Armed Forces (UAF) Tochka-U ballistic missile, belonging to Ukraine’s 19th Missle Brigade, caused the damage.
RF armed forces built the Krasniy Oktiabr depot during the Spring and Summer of 2021, as part of a major Kremlin shift of forces from cantonments deep inside Russia, to field camps adjacent to Ukraine’s border. At the time the Kremlin said the deployments were defensive and intended to protect the RF from NATO aggression.
Other Ukrainian news agencies also identified a Tochka-U missile as the cause of the blast, but, by mid-morning Wednesday no confirmation was available from official Ukrainian sources.
Vyacheslav Gadkov, Governor of the RF’s Belgorod Oblast’, initially told state-controlled media the cause of the explosion was unknown, and that no one had been hurt.
The RF’s state-controlled TASS news agency on Wednesday morning said four RF service personnel were injured at the facility, following the explosion of a “munition”. Fire-fighting crews are on the scene, the government statement said.
Kyiv has admitted to only one retaliatory strike on RF territory. On the first day of the war UAF units fired a Tochka-U missile at an RF airfield near the Rostov Oblast’ town of Millerovo, destroying aircraft and damaging runways.
RF forces since their Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine have hit Ukrainian targets countless times, using all available weapons systems ranging from hand-held grenade launchers to massed artillery to aerial bombs to hypersonic missiles.
Starting in the second week of the war, the Kremlin’s forces have targeted mostly Ukrainian civilian homes and businesses, in an attempt to browbeat the Ukrainian population into surrendering.
