A huge explosion rocked the Ukrainian city of Khmelnitsky yesterday.

There were quite a few reports of it on the web last night, although most have disappeared today, no doubt due to Ukraine censorship. These are some of the few still remaining. The video is dramatic.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12081047/Ukrainian-city-Khmelnytskyi-rocked-huge-explosion-causing-fireball-injured-30-people.html

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/gigantic-fireball-explosion-rocks-town-in-western-ukraine.

Today, google searches turn up multiple reports of (much smaller) Ukrainian strikes on Russian depots, but most of the hits on this event have mysteriously disappeared.

One of the websites I looked at yesterday (I can’t find it now) showed a pre-explosion satellite image of the site, and even to the untrained eye it is clearly an ammo dump or missile storage facility of some kind. Isolated revetment and roofless, walled storage areas are easily visible, along with what look like piles of old rocket casings, exposed to the sky. The area is huge, approximately a square mile, and filled with separated, sunken storages for hazardous materials. It has been clearly designed to survive enemy attack. I’m not a good enough photointerp guy to tell if this is a storage for old hazardous materials, an actual ammo dump, or a marshalling yard and staging area for recent NATO weapons deliveries. Supposedly, the site was hit by a simultaneous Russian drone strike, Ukrainian sources reported several dozen injuries but no deaths, and the detonation was on the order of one kiloton.

I’m not too surprised that Russians are attacking military storage depots, but the sheer magnitude of this explosion, plus the way it seems to be ignored today in the news, concerns me. With the spring offensive getting rolling, and massive western weapons deliveries underway, I’m worried this time luck might be on Putin’s side.