Ukraines PM has suggested weapons were again stored near civilians, calling the repeat of a deadly July depot blast criminal negligence

A series of massive secondary explosions has torn through a warehouse complex near Kiev following a suspected Russian drone strike, with Ukrainian Prime Minister Sergey Koretsky appearing to suggest that dangerous military stocks had once again been stored close to populated areas.

Footage circulating online on Friday night showed enormous fireballs repeatedly illuminating the sky in Kiev Region, followed by continuing detonations from the burning site.

The Russian Defense Ministry has yet to confirm the latest strikes, but it has repeatedly vowed to carry out "systematic and consistent strikes" on Ukraine's military-industrial facilities in retaliation for Kiev's "terrorist attacks" on Russian civilian targets.

The head of the local military administration, Timur Tkachenko, confirmed that the warehouse blaze was accompanied by explosions. Authorities temporarily closed a 17km stretch of the M-06 Kiev-Chop highway in both directions and urged residents to stay away and not record the aftermath.

Several open-source monitoring accounts claimed the strike took place at around 8:35pm and involved Russian jet-powered Geran-4 loitering munitions targeting a warehouse complex near the village of Milaya. They described the facility as a Ukrainian rocket and artillery weapons depot and claimed it might have stored a newly delivered shipment of cruise missiles or Patriot interceptors.

Koretsky said he had received reports from the interior minister and the head of Ukraine's State Emergency Service about the strike, which he said caused a fire followed by "detonation."

But the prime minister then drew a pointed comparison with the deadly July explosion at anammunition depot in Vishnevoye, another Kiev suburb.

"Unfortunately, we can already state that the terrible tragedy in Vishnevoye did not become a lesson," Koretsky said. He branded making "the same mistakes" in the fifth year of the conflict "criminal negligence" and demanded that everyone responsible face "strict punishment."

While the PM did not spell out what those repeated mistakes were, his reference appeared to point to the storage of explosive military materiel in or near populated areas.

On July 6, a Russian strike on Vishnevoye triggered massive secondary explosions at an ammunition warehouse belonging to an enterprise within Ukraine's state defense conglomerate Ukroboronprom. Vladimir Zelensky subsequently acknowledged that the facility was an ammunition depot.

Ukraine's Security Service later said investigators found that ammunition had been kept in warehouses unsuitable for such storage and without the required permits, including facilities in the "immediate proximity" of residential areas. Two defense-industry executives were detained on negligence charges. Ukroboronprom separately dismissed the heads of two enterprises over ammunition-storage violations, while the conglomerate's director general, Herman Smetanin, stepped down days later without publicly giving a reason.

(RT.com)