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Ukrainian authorities suspect sabotage of being at the origin of explosions that ripped up a munitions depot Tuesday morning, sending fireballs into the sky and causing the evacuation of more than 12,000 people.
No casualties were reported at the depot located 176 kilometers east of the capital Kyiv. According to the Ministry of Defense, the explosions occurred at a rate of two to three per second at one time.
Ukraine once pinpointed Russia for such incidents, as relations between the two countries plunged after the annexation of Crimea by Moscow in 2014 and support for separatist forces in the Donbass region.
Without providing any evidence, the Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister linked the explosions to a pending decision in Istanbul this week authorizing Ukraine to establish an independent national church, which Russia fiercely opposes.
A Reuters witness later saw powerful explosions continue at the depot, which broke the windows of the surrounding village houses. At the same time, explosions could also be heard in a nearby wood, where ammunition appeared to have fallen.
The fact that explosions were fired at regular intervals in different parts of the depot denounced sabotage, said a spokesman for the Ministry of Defense.
"Two simultaneous explosions and after five minutes two more explosions [in another part of the depot] suggest that it was a military sabotage, "said Rodion Tymoshenko at a press briefing.
The smoke increases after the explosion at ammunition depot of a military base Tuesday near the city of Ichnya, about 170 kilometers east of Kiev. (Vlad Musienko / Photo of the PM's service pool via AP)
The authorities closed the airspace within a radius of 30 km and suspended road and rail transport. Emergency services reported that the gas and electricity supply in the area had been disrupted.
"The noise started at 3 am It sounded three times, then I woke up and ran to my family to start waking them up," said Valentyna Petrenko, who lives in the nearby village Druzhba.
"We slipped into the basement and took documents, papers, everything we could, blankets, pillows, and stayed in the basement."
Not the first of its kind
Hundreds of people and equipment were deployed to the site, according to a statement from the emergency services, which was joined by Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman and the head of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Viktor Muzhenko. President Petro Poroshenko had called for a report.
Several large fires have affected ammunition and weapons depots in recent years, which represents an additional burden for the Ukrainian army. Fighting between Ukrainian troops and Moscow-backed separatist rebels has killed more than 10,000 people since 2014.
A resident of the locality talks with police and officers of the National Guard in the village of Parafiivka, near the explosions. (Gleb Garanich / Reuters)
Last year, massive explosions in a military depot in the Vynnytsya region, 270 kilometers west of Kyiv, forced the authorities to tell 24,000 people to leave.
Moreover, a cyberattack has hit the Internet services of the Ukrainian state's tax service since Monday night, the service said Tuesday. It has disrupted programs used by millions of people for procedures such as tax filing.
A statement on the organization's website identified him as a denial of service attack.
Ukraine has suffered a number of high-profile hacking attacks in recent years targeting critical infrastructure, including the power grid or institutions such as the Ministry of Finance.
