A warehouse full of ammunition in Ukraine exploded Tuesday, forcing tens of thousands of people to evacuate as rockets shot into the air and blew up.
Authorities evacuated around 30,000 people from Kalynivka, about 120 miles south of Kiev, Ukraine, after a fire broke out around 10 p.m. Tuesday at the munitions warehouse. Government officials suspect sabotage by Ukraine’s enemies, and claim that most of the munitions were undamaged in the blaze and explosion.
Several videos show rockets shooting into the air before a massive explosion, leveling several buildings near the warehouse.
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More than 188,000 tons of ammunition were kept at the warehouse, the Associated Press reports, and the armory was one of the storage facilities that provided weapons to soldiers fighting with Russia-backed rebels.
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Ukraine’s Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman told local TV that the explosion may have been a sabotage, saying that the country is at war and the enemies “will do all they can to make us weak.”
“This is the arsenal of the Ukrainian army, and I think it was no accident that it was destroyed,” Groysman said.
Remarkably, the government claims that 70 percent of the munitions survived the fire and explosion in-tact, thanks to routine safety protocols at the facility.
Another armory in eastern Ukraine burned and exploded in March, and authorities believed that disaster was also part of Ukraine’s ongoing conflict with pro-Russian separatist forces the country has been battling since 2014.
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