Toropets mushroom cloud via X.com.
Ukraine blew up a Russian ammo depot, and the blast was so strong it registered 2.8 on the Richter scale. James Brooke reports in The New York Sun:
Ukraine has beaten Russia in a race to shake the steppes with an earthquake and send up a mushroom cloud visible from outer space. For weeks, Russian commentators have urged the Kremlin to drop a nuclear weapon on Ukraine. Yesterday, it was Ukraine who pulled off what may be the single largest explosion of the war. They did it the old fashioned, non-nuclear way: blowing up an ammunition dump.
The central explosion was so massive that seismic stations as far away as Estonia registered a 2.8 magnitude earthquake. In outer space, NASA satellites orbiting above the earth detected intense heat signatures from the five square mile area, near Toropets, in western Russia’s Tver region.
On the ground at Toropets, the initial mushroom cloud and subsequent fires blew out windows, flattened two villages, injured dozens of people, and forced the temporary evacuation of 3,000 more. Some villagers, caught between explosions and a lake, cowered on a shoreline, watching as fires burned for 12 hours.
“The situation is under control,” the governor of the Tver Region, Igor Rudenya, grimly lectured in a video recorded 10 hours after the first blast. While he talked, TV viewers could hear artillery shells cooking off in the background. The governor said a fire had been caused by debris from downed drones. However, Russia’s Defense Ministry did not report shooting down any drones yesterday over the Tver region.
In reality, a swarm of over 100 kamikaze drones had flown north from Ukraine. In the light of the full moon, they must have looked like a cauldron of bats. After three hours and 300 miles, they started dive bombing their target: one of Russia’s largest military stockpiles forward deployed in Western Russia.
Completed in 2018, the arsenal was touted as built to the world’s highest standards of safety and fire control. The project organizer, Deputy Defense Minister Dmitry Bulgakov, boasted to TV reporters that the new, $100 million depot was “protected from air and missile strikes, and even from the damaging effects of a nuclear explosion.” Six weeks ago, General Bulgakov was arrested on charges of fraud, stemming from an unrelated case — allegedly taking bribes to provide substandard rations to soldiers.
Read more here.
Ukraine destroyed one of Russia’s largest weapons depots.
A drone swarm struck the depot in Toropets in the Tver region, 480 km from the frontlines.
The explosion destroyed hundreds of S-300, S-400, Iskander & North Korean ballistic missiles, causing a 2.8 magnitude earthquake pic.twitter.com/Ht6Y7put4C
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) September 18, 2024
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