“At 3 hours and 30 minutes, information came from the head of the 6th arsenal that an explosion occurred in the technical area near the settlement of Ichnya, Chernihiv Oblast. The scale is being specified,” the statement reads. As noted in the General Staff, "people are being evacuated, the emergency response team is deployed."
“The task force led by the Chief of the General Staff went to the scene of the incident,” the message reads. “Relevant restrictive measures are being taken throughout the Chernigov region and along the border.”
Over the past two years, Ukraine has experienced several large fires at military arsenals; in March 2017, about 70% of the ammunition was destroyed in a fire in Balakliya, Kharkiv region. The Ministry of Defense of the country then called the sabotage the cause of the incident, but opposition representatives expressed the opinion that the fire could have been organized to conceal the theft of weapons. On May 3, 2018, this warehouse again caught fire, a fire arose on the territory of the technical site, where the territory was cleaned and demined from remnants of ammunition that did not explode after the 2017 fire.
In September last year, a fire also occurred at the ammunition depot in Kalinovka, Vinnitsa region, according to the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, in warehouses where about 83 thousand tons of ammunition were stored, including the Smerch, Uragan and Grad rocket launchers , destroyed up to a third of stocks. Also regularly small fires occur in the warehouses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the Donbass.
