Explosion in Belgorod, Russia Stringer/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Russian media on Wednesday reported explosions at an ammunition depot near Belgorod and two other storage sites near Ukraine’s eastern border, in the latest cases of “unexplained fires and explosions at strategic locations in Russia, including storage depots, a sensitive defense research site and that of the… country’s largest chemical plant,” reports the Washington Post.
“All affected locations are likely involved in supplying fuel and ammunition to troops stationed in the Donbass, and the damage could hamper Russia’s efforts to maintain its offensive there,” the Post reports, “raising suspicions that at least some of these may have been caused could be sabotage or Ukrainian attacks.”
Local Russian officials blamed Ukrainian attack helicopters for an April 1 explosion at fuel depots in Belgorod, but as incidents multiplied it became “an issue officials in Moscow prefer to avoid,” writes BBC Monitoring’s Vitaliy Shevchenko. “Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory would be an embarrassment to the Kremlin, which had hoped to seize control of Ukraine within days of February’s invasion.”
“For their part, Ukrainian officials have hinted at involvement in the incidents without explicitly admitting it,” reports the Wall Street Journal.
“Karma is a cruel thing,” wrote Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in Russian on Wednesday. Oleksiy Arestovych, a military adviser to Zelenskyy, suggested: “You need to look for reasons inside Russia – for example, to hide the means by which money was stolen from the Russian Defense Ministry.”
“It’s clear why Ukraine would be reluctant to admit cross-border attacks,” writes the BBC’s Shevchenko. “They would amount to a major escalation in an already bitter conflict.”
And there are other plausible explanations than sabotage or airstrikes. Largely thanks to negligence, “Russia suffers from self-inflicted injuries even in peacetime,” Russian security expert Keir Giles told the Journal at London’s Chatham House. “With the added stress of an offensive war, it’s no surprise that the rate of natural casualties is increasing.”
The story goes on
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