Ukraine-Russia war latest: Mass drone attack on Russian arms depot sparks huge fire

A Toropets chatroom on the Russian social media site VK was flooded with messages of support from other parts of the country and offers of help to people fleeing the town.

Some people were asking whether buildings at specific addresses were still standing.

“People, does anyone know what’s happened to Kudino village??? They told me nothing is left of our house,” posted one woman.

Another woman replied: “It’s horror there.” Kudino is a village 4.5 km (2.8 miles) northeast of Toropets.

The size of the main blast shown in unverified social media footage of the blast at the Tver arms depot was consistent with 200-240 tonnes of high explosives detonating, George William Herbert of the California’s Middlebury Institute of International Studies told Reuters.

According to an RIA state news agency report from 2018, Russia was building an arsenal for the storage of missiles, ammunition and explosives in Toropets – the site of the mass Ukrainian drone attack.

Dmitry Bulgakov, then a deputy defence minister, told RIA in 2018 that the facility could defend weapons from missiles and even a small nuclear attack. Bulgakov was arrested earlier this year on corruption charges, which he denies.

“It [the concrete facilities] ensures their reliable and safe storage, protects them from air and missile strikes and even from the damaging factors of a nuclear explosion,” RIA quoted Mr Bulgakov as saying at the time.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva had a phone call with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on Wednesday, the former’s office said, adding that they discussed topics including the Ukraine war and an upcoming Brics summit.

The two leaders “talked about themes that will be addressed at the BRICS summit next month in Kazan, bilateral relations, and Brazil’s and China’s peace proposal for the conflict between Russia and Ukraine”, the Brazilian government said.

At least 13 people were injured in the Ukrainian drone attack on a Russian arms depot in Tver, Russia’s health ministry has claimed.

State news agency Tass quoted regional governor Igor Rudenya as saying that no citizens sustained serious injuries and nobody was killed.

Norway has said that elevated levels of radioactive caesium it had detected near the Arctic border with Russia were likely due to a forest fire near Chernobyl in Ukraine, the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident.

The Norwegian Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority (DSA) said on Tuesday that it had measured “very low” levels of radioactive caesium at Svanhovd and Viksjoefjell near the Arctic border with Russia.

The authority said it detected elevated levels of radioactive caesium at Svanhovd during the week to Tuesday and at Viksjoefjell from 5 to 12 September, but that the levels did not pose a risk to humans or the environment.

“DSA always finds caesium at all air filter stations in Norway, and this often comes from stirred-up dust from old fallout from the Chernobyl accident,” it said on Wednesday. “This time it is most likely that the forest fire around Chernobyl is to blame.”

Finland’s president Alexander Stubb defended his country’s decision to buy arms from Israel despite the war in Gaza, saying it had no link to Finland’s unwillingness to recognise an independent Palestinian state at the present time.

Finland is acquiring a ground based, high altitude, missile defence system called David’s Sling from Israel. Helsinki considers the system a high priority for its own defence due to neighbouring Russia’s ongoing missile attacks on civilian and military targets in Ukraine.

Mr Stubb, who took office in March, has defined his and Finland’s new foreign policy stance as “values-based realism”, which he has said was about “achieving things in the world as it is”, instead of “promoting only the world how I want to see it”.

He added: “I only look at realism, in other words, the fact that we need those weapons. So that’s when I look at Finnish security.”

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said last month that his recently announced plan for victory includes not only battlefield goals but also diplomatic and economic wins.

The plan has been kept under wraps but the US ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, told reporters on Tuesday that Washington officials have seen it.

“We think it lays out a strategy and a plan that can work,” she said, adding that the United States will raise the plan with other world leaders next week at the UN General Assembly in New York.