Ukrainian drones attacked Russia’s Tver region on Wednesday, triggering a massive blast. Tver, which lies northwest of Moscow and is closer to the border with Belarus, is considered a major arsenal for conventional weapons, according to Russian state media. There are also reports of fires covering a large area.
According to a report by Reuters, an unverified video and images on social media showed a huge ball of flame blasting high into the night sky. They also showed multiple detonations across a lake in the region. The report says residents living near the site were being evacuated but no casualties had been reported.
Igor Rudenya, the governor of the Tver region, said in a post on the regional administration's Telegram channel that firefighters were trying to contain the fire but had not specified what was burning. Russia’s defence ministry has not made any statements regarding the attack.
The report also says that NASA satellites picked up several heat sources emanating from the site in the early hours of Wednesday. Furthermore, sensors in earthquake monitoring stations picked up signals that were earlier thought to be minor earthquakes in the area.
George William Herbert of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey in California was quoted in the report as saying that the size of the main blast shown in the unverified social media video was consistent with 200-240 tonnes of high explosives detonating.