Ukraine's ammunition depot blasts cost 1 billion dollars: official

The economic losses caused by the recent explosions at an ammunition warehouse in Ukraine's eastern Kharkov region is estimated at about 1 billion U.S. dollars, a senior security official said on Thursday.

"Tens of thousands of combat-ready ammunition and tens of thousands of incapable ammunition were stored at the depot. Due to the blasts, we lost ammunition totally worth about 1 billion dollars," Sergei Pashinsky, head of the parliamentary committee on national security and defense, told local media.

After the blasts, Ukrainian authorities are considering transferring all of the country's combat-ready ammunition to special fire-resistant storages made of concrete, Pashinsky said.

On March 23, explosions ripped through a military base near the town of Balakleya, where about 138,000 tons of ammunition were stored, leading to a massive fire and the subsequent detonation of the ammunition.

According to the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, the explosions, which lasted for about a week, have destroyed 70 percent of the ammunition stored at the military base.

The State Security Service of Ukraine suspects that the explosions were caused by an attack on the military base from an unmanned aerial vehicle. Endi