KIEV, Oct. 16 (Xinhua) -- Ukraine has suffered losses to the tune of 2 billion U.S. dollars due to incidents at ammunition depots in the past two and a half years, a senior security official said on Tuesday.
Sergei Pashinsky, the head of the parliamentary committee on national security and defense, told a parliament coordination board that Kiev must "radically transform" its method of ammunition storage to prevent incidents at ammo depots in the future.
On Oct. 9, a fire started at an ammunition depot near the town of Ichnya, about 170 km east of Kiev, triggering a subsequent massive detonation of the ammunition.
Efforts are still underway to fully extinguish the fire and the explosions at the depot which contains about 69,500 tons of ammunition.
This marked the fifth such incident in Ukraine since 2015. The previous four blasts occurred in ammunition depots in the Donetsk, Lugansk and Kharkov regions in eastern Ukraine and the Vinnytsya region in central Ukraine.
