Explosions rock Russian military airbase in annexed Crimea | Russia-Ukraine war News

One person killed and several others injured in the Russian-annexed territory, local authorities say.

One person has been killed and several others wounded by explosions at a military airbase at Saki in the Russian-controlled Crimean Peninsula, local Russian authorities have said.

Russia’s Ministry of Defence said munitions blew up at the base, and it emphasised that the installation had not been shelled.

There was no immediate comment regarding responsibility for an attack from Ukrainian authorities.

Unverified videos posted on social networks showed sunbathers fleeing a nearby beach as huge clouds of smoke from the explosions rose over the horizon.

One person was killed, the head of Crimea’s administration Sergey Aksyonov said on social media. Earlier, Konstantin Skorupsky, the head of Crimea’s healthcare department, reported five people were wounded, with one of them hospitalised and the others treated for cuts from shards of glass and released.

If the base was, in fact, struck by the Ukrainians, it would mark the first known major attack on a Russian military site on the Crimean Peninsula, annexed by Moscow in 2014, and a significant escalation of the conflict.

The headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in the Crimean port of Sevastopol was hit by a small-scale explosion delivered by a makeshift drone last month in an attack blamed on Ukrainian saboteurs.

Aksyonov said ambulances and medical helicopters were sent to the Saki airbase and the area was sealed off within a radius of five kilometres (three miles).

Shortly after the explosions, Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, tweeted that Crimea’s future was to be a “pearl of the Black Sea … Not a military base for terrorists”, without making a direct reference to the blast at Saki.

Demilitarization of the Russian Federation — an integral part of global security ensuring. The future of the Crimea is to be a pearl of the Black Sea, a national park with unique nature and a world resort. Not a military base for terrorists. It is just the beginning.

— Михайло Подоляк (@Podolyak_M) August 9, 2022

Officials in Moscow have long warned Ukraine that any attack on Crimea would trigger massive retaliation, including attacks on “decision-making centres” in Kyiv.

The Saki base has been used by Russian warplanes to attack areas in Ukraine’s south on short notice. Crimea borders the southern Ukrainian region of Kherson, now controlled by Moscow.

The southeastern region of Zaporizhia, hosting Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, partially occupied by the Russian army, is also nearby.