A series of powerful explosions destroyed a vast ammunition depot adjacent to the town of Toropets, in the Tver region of Russia, in the early hours of Wednesday, September 18. The Russian army’s 107th arsenal, located 500 kilometers north of the Ukrainian border and storing 240 tonnes of ammunition, was hit by projectiles fired by the Ukrainian army. The explosions were so powerful that they were detected by seismic monitoring systems. The first tremor of magnitude 2.8 were recorded at 3:56 am, followed by seven weaker ones, ranging from 2 to 2.8 on the Richter scale.
Numerous videos filmed by local residents and the Russian military documented the immense mushroom cloud rising into the air and its aftermath. Russian authorities reported 17 injuries. A video shot at around 8 am by a local from Toropets (population 11,000) showed dozens of homes with blown-out windows. Incessant explosions can be heard, indicating that several hours after the attack, the situation at the depot remained out of control. Satellite images released by the private US space company Maxar show that the forest bordering the depot continued to burn for part of the day.
The unprecedented resources deployed by the Ukrainian army no doubt had something to do with the scale of the damage. More than 100 drones took part in the operation, according to a military source in Kyiv quoted by the RBK-Ukraïna news website. In several videos of the attack, the characteristic whistling of jet engines can be distinctly heard, suggesting that the attack was carried out at least partially by cruise missiles. Until now, attacks deeper into Russia’s interior had been carried out using propeller-driven drones, which are much slower and therefore easier to shoot down by anti-aircraft defense (AAD).
‘Falling drone debris’
In these two short videos, neither the crackling of automatic weapons nor the firing of surface-to-air missiles can be heard, but this does not mean that the Russian DAA remained passive. An eyewitness account gathered by the Russian exile media Novayagazeta.eu noted that no AAD fire was heard.
The pro-Kremlin Telegram channel Military Observer suggested that the Ukrainian projectile may be the new Palianitsya “drone missile,” whose first successful test Volodymyr Zelensky announced at the end of August. The Ukrainian specialist site Defense Express, on the other hand, points to a Ukrainian-made Neptune missile (with three times the explosive charge), in a modernized version.
The Russian Defense Ministry tirelessly repeated its daily mantra that “all Ukrainian drones have been shot down,” while the incident was due to “falling drone debris.” Curiously, in listing the regions where its AAD has shot down Ukrainian drones, the Russian Defense Ministry fails to mention Tver. The Russian media largely ignored the disaster.
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