Vladivostok residents hear nighttime explosion by naval base in Pacific port city. Officials attribute blast to air-defense exercises.
Residents of Vladivostok, a major Pacific port city in the Russian Far East, report hearing a nighttime blast near a naval base located in the area. The explosion was heard in the early hours on August 9.
A local Telegram news channel quotes a message received from one of the readers:
I live on Pacific Heroes Street by the Bay of Ulysses. Around half-an-hour ago (3:30 a.m.) there was some sort of blast from the side of the naval base! The police, the fire brigade, and even the FSB have all been summoned. The whole building is awake!
Local attorney and politician Maxim Chikhunov writes that the FSB is discouraging the community from talking about what happened. He quotes an anonymous local woman who said: “In the morning, the FSB operatives were here and questioned us. They told my neighbor not to tell anyone about what happened.”
The Telegram news channel Astra has posted footage from another local resident, showing a flying object hovering in the nighttime sky over the city.
Commenting on the incident, the Eastern Military District’s press service reported that the naval ship Gromky of Russia’s Pacific Fleet had conducted a training exercise in covering the port from an air strike. Gromky’s air defense systems “executed the algorithm of deflecting a would-be air attack,” says the press release on the Russian Defense Ministry’s website.