Ukraine war: Explosions rock Russian-held areas far from front

Ukraine has been making use since last month of advanced rockets supplied by the West to strike sites that are behind Russian lines.

Explosions erupted overnight near military bases deep within Russian-held areas of Ukraine and in Russia itself, an apparent display of Kyiv’s growing ability to wreak havoc on Moscow’s logistics far from front lines.

Ukraine also issued a new warning about a frontline nuclear power station where it said it believed Moscow was planning a “large-scale provocation” as a justification to decouple the plant from the Ukrainian power grid and connect it to Russia’s.

In Crimea – the peninsula Russia seized and annexed in 2014 – explosions were reported near an air base in Belbek, on the southwest coast near Sevastopol, headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. On the opposite end of the peninsula, the sky was also lit up at Kerch near a huge bridge to Russia, with what Russia said was fire from its air defences.

Inside Russia, two villages were evacuated after explosions at an ammunition dump in Belgorod province, near the Ukrainian border but more than 100 km from territory controlled by Ukrainian forces.

Kyiv has cultivated an atmosphere of ambiguity around such explosions by withholding official comment on incidents in Crimea or inside Russia, while hinting that it was behind them, using long-range weapons or sabotage.

Russian officials reported no one hurt in Crimea or Belgorod. They said they had shot down drones in Belbek and Kerch, and confirmed that they had ordered the evacuation of two villages in Belgorod where they were investigating the cause of a fire.

“It certainly looks bad – or good – dependent on the perspective,” tweeted former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt, with video showing huge flames and smoke in the night sky, purportedly at the Russian base in Belbek. Reuters could not confirm the authenticity of the video.

Closer to the front, Kyiv also announced a number of strikes overnight behind Russian lines in southern Kherson province, including at a bridge at the Kakhovska Dam, one of the last routes for Russia to supply thousands of troops on west bank of the Dnipro River.