Seismic event

Later that day, the Russian Defence Ministry reported that it had intercepted 54 drones over the Kursk, Bryansk, Smolensk, Belgorod and Oryol regions overnight on Tuesday, but made no mention of the Tver region at all. While Russian Deputy Health Minister Alexey Kuznetsov later said that 13 residents of the Tver region had been hospitalised and were in moderately serious conditions as a result of falling debris from intercepted drones, the Russian authorities have still not made any public comment about the fire and explosions around Toropets two days later.

The Russian media has frequently covered the state-of-the-art Toropets military arsenal, which was designed for ammunition, missiles and explosives to be stored safely in close proximity to one another.

According to Spetsstroy, Russia’s federal agency for special construction, only high-quality, domestically produced materials were used in the construction of the facility, while state-affiliated Russian news outlet Rossiyskaya Gazeta reported in 2015 that the arsenal would cost the treasury some €35 million.

Sergey Shoigu, Russia’s defence minister at the time, said that “454 storage facilities are to be built, thus completing the arrangement of 13 modern arsenals and bringing the missile and ammunition storage system in line with established requirements.”

The Toropets arsenal extended over almost 8 square kilometres and was able to store 30,000 tonnes of various different types of ammunition, according to Ukrainian sources, while Russian media reports have described the Toropets ammunition depot as meeting the highest international safety standards.

At the time of the arsenal’s construction, pro-Kremlin media gushed at the involvement of now former deputy defence minister General Dmitry Bulgakov, who approved and oversaw the construction of the facility, and attended its opening ceremony. According to Bulgakov, who was fired from his post in September 2022 and is currently under investigation for large-scale embezzlement, the arsenal was so secure that it was quite possible to store enormous stockpiles of missiles and ammunition side by side without fear that an enemy strike could cause a detonation.

According to a source in the Security Service of Ukraine who spoke to the BBC, the Ukrainian drone strike destroyed Russian Iskander and Tochka U missiles, as well as glide bombs stored at the warehouse. According to Andriy Kovalenko, head of Ukraine’s Centre for Countering Disinformation, the warehouse also stored North Korean KN23 missiles supplied by Pyongyang to support Russia’s war effort last year.

Independent news outlet ASTRA reported that two military units were stationed in Toropets, noting that one of them had already been subjected to at least two drone strikes, causing fires to break out in its barracks in both May and June. Neither the local authorities nor the Russian Defence Ministry confirmed these incidents at the time.

Plenty of room to explode

While Toropets residents were evacuated shortly after the Wednesday attack, people living in the village of Tsikarevo, located just opposite the burning arsenal, found themselves cut off and had to evacuate on their own by crossing a nearby lake, according to ASTRA: “Some residents left on their boats, while others were waiting on the shore to be evacuated by the local authorities.”

After analysing satellite footage, pro-Ukrainian Telegram channel Crimean Wind noted that in the early hours of Wednesday, “only a few of the nearly 100 warehouses and munition storage spaces” had exploded, despite the fact that munitions containing an estimated 1 kilotonne of TNT had been destroyed in the strike.

“Satellite footage shows that the arsenal has at least 60 covered warehouses, each with a capacity of up to 240 tonnes, and about 40 mixed and open storage sites. So there is plenty of room to explode,” Crimean Wind wrote.

Left to their own devices

“Up to six drones attacked the depot as far as I know,” Toropets resident Mikhail K told Novaya Europe. Mikhail, who previously served in the Russian army and was present when the explosion occurred, recalled that “one air defence unit continued to fire into the air even after several drones had hit their targets. Ammunition began to detonate and a major fire started. That was evident from the tracers in the sky.”

Another source told Novaya Europe that the fire caused the ammunition stored at the depot to detonate almost immediately. Local residents said it felt like a major earthquake, with windows being blown out in buildings all over Toropets and even in surrounding villages several kilometres away. The arsenal was built to contemporary safety standards for such facilities, and its design prevented the ammunition flying even further afield in the explosion. It remains unclear what became of the team guarding the arsenal at two checkpoints and in the depot itself, or of the air defence fire unit.

According to Mikhail, next to the main arsenal there’s also an older military barracks where old ammunition is stored and where trees have already begun to grow between the boxes of ammunition, which were simply left lying on the ground. The flames could also potentially have reached that site.

“There is a hill between the arsenal and the town that slightly protected the residential areas,” Mikhail continued. “When locals saw the inferno, they rushed to drive to the train station in Staraya Toropa. The route takes you through several other villages, and there were some traffic jams. The most adventurous drivers turned onto a dirt road through the village of Selyane, leading to congestion there too. Families were sitting in their cars on the side of the road.”

The villages of Kodlino, Kudino and Tsikarevo are on the other side of the town and the arsenal. According to Mikhail, residents of Tsikarevo were cut off by the fire and were eventually evacuated by volunteers from neighbouring villages who sailed five boats across a lake to reach them. The local authorities did nothing to help those fleeing the fire, and no financial compensation or any other form of assistance was being offered to the victims on Wednesday.