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There has been a major explosion at an ammunition dump in the government-controlled town of Svatovo in the Lugansk region.
The site is still on fire and munitions are continuing to cook off and explode.
A correspondent for Ukraine’s 112 television channel reported that the explosions appeared to originate from the grounds of a dairy processing factory, located near the eastern Lunacharsky quarter of the town. The site has been used by the Ukrainian military as an ammunition storage area. Mobile communications in the area have been disrupted.
112 reported that the blast wave was felt as far away as the villages of Melovatka, Nizhnaya Duvanka and Pokrovskoye.
Zoryan Shkiryak, an adviser to the interior minister, wrote on his Facebook page that two people have been killed and three wounded.
Novosti Donbassa reports that the fire began at 19:30 and is focused within an area of around 300 square metres. Almost 3,500 tonnes of ammunition were stored at the site.
The Ukrainian army has closed off access to Svatovo and residents are being evacuated towards Troitskoye and Kremenna
Georgiy Tuka, the governor of the Lugansk region, told 112 that, according to preliminary information, the fire was sparked by two shorts from a flare gun.
The SBU has qualified the incident as a terrorist act.
— Pierre Vaux
President Petro Poroshenko has announced that nine Ukrainian prisoners of war have been released from separatist captivity.
The separatist Donetsk News Agency (DAN) reported that the eleven separatist fighters held by the Ukrainians were exchanged for the Ukrainian POWs.
The exchange took place outside the town of Schastye, in the Lugansk region under the auspices of the OSCE, the Joint Committee for Control and Coordination (JCCC) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
UNIAN named the freed Ukrainian captives as Aleksandr Shirin, Dmitry Polishchuk, Vadlimir Polishchuk, Vladimir Dmitrenko, Ivan Boyko, Roman Smagurov, Sergei Tkachenko, Karat Mukhamedov and Aleksandr Mikhailyuk,
One of the men is a civilian while the others are either soldiers or volunteer fighters. Mikhailyuk was captured defending Donetsk Airport, which fell to Russian-backed forces in January this year.
— Pierre Vaux
Colonel Oleksandr Motuzyanyk, a military spokesman for the Presidential Administration, announced at noon today that one Ukrainian soldier had been killed and three wounded over the last 24 hours.
According to Motuzyanyk, the three soldiers were wounded a result of an attack by Russian-backed fighters fired on Ukrainian positions on the outskirts of Avdeyevka.
Ukrainian troops came under fire from small arms and grenade launchers for around half an hour, he said.
The fatality occurred when a soldier set off a tripwire mine near the village of Verkhnotoretskoye, around 12 kilometres north-east of Avdeyevka.
The ATO Press Centre reported no other ceasefire violations after the attack, which lasted from 19:40 until 20:10, last night.
Meanwhile the ‘defence ministry’ of the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) claimed today that Ukrainian forces had shelled separatist-held territory 12 times over the last day.
According to the DNR, Ukrainian troops in Opytnoye and Avdeyevka fired more than 30 mortar rounds at separatist-held positions near Donetsk Airport and the Donetsk suburb of Spartak, in the same area of the front in which Ukraine reported the attack last night.
— Pierre Vaux