Про этот склад в западной прессе появилось мнение, что он и есть главной целью "восстания" в Славянске. Якобы, он взят под контроль, чтобы не допустить раздачу стволов украинскому населению.
ft.com
At first glance, the small city of Slavyansk has little to commend it as the locus for an escalating stand-off between Moscow and Kiev in eastern Ukraine.
There are no critical armaments factories, no military bases, no key transport routes and no geostrategic redoubts that might readily explain why tensions here have been, in recent days, so particularly tightly wound.
By Friday morning, the city had become the target of a fresh military offensive from Kiev against pro-Russian separatism.
According to the UK’s Royal United Services Institute, a respected military think-tank, the city is now “the focus of a game of deterrence and brinkmanship [that] may propel Moscow to the very brink of overt intervention”.
Just outside of Slavyansk, is an installation that military experts now say may offer an explanation as to why: a vast cache of small arms.
As many as 5m weapons – from rifles to machine guns – have been kept in storage in former salt mines near Slavyansk as part of cold war contingency plans to arm the local population in the event of foreign invasion.
Analysts and intelligence sources the FT spoke to said they believed Moscow military planners are taking the existence of the stockpile incredibly seriously, in the fear that Kiev will move to distribute the arms, potentially setting the stage for a much more violent conflict.
The threat of unleashing the arms has raised the spectre of a “Balkanisation” of the conflict, according to one senior European diplomatic source.
Most analysts said they had little doubt that Russian spetsnaz – special forces – units were engaged in directing and inciting local separatist groups in the area, in some instances apparently with the particular aim of preventing Kiev accessing its arms stockpile.
The fact that local pro-Moscow protesters knew about the existence of the weapons cache – and were set up outside it, blockading access – points to a military level of planning, said one intelligence expert who declined to be named.
“Local militias and separatists try to take over town halls, not hidden strategic ammunition dumps,” he said.
“There’s a lot of opportunism here – what Putin is doing is responding to what started as a crisis for him, but he is doing so with great, planned tactical cleverness,” said Michael Clarke, RUSI’s director-general, who co-authored the thinktank’s report on the Slavyansk arms cache. “This has been thought through very carefully ... these are sophisticated military operations.”
What has so far been a highly successful covert campaign in eastern Ukraine could go badly wrong for Moscow if small arms were released to pro-Kiev forces, Mr Clarke said.
“It’s been relatively easy for the Kremlin so far, but if the Ukrainians run an armed insurgency then Russia is going to need to commit a lot more than 48,000 troops in any invasion to keep its ground.”
The key question may well now, however, be how much control Moscow still has over the separatist groups it has helped to incite – and whether strategic issues like the arms cache are driving tensions so much as the momentum of events on the ground.
“Forces beyond the control of decision makers have been unleashed,” says Samuel Charap senior fellow for Russian and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “There are a lot of young, untrained people with weapons facing off against a lot of other young untrained people with weapons ... it’s a tinder box.”
>Есть информация из разных агенств:
> http://russian.rt.com/article/29512#ixzz301Aq4y9e
>22:21 мск "...Данных о погибших или раненых пока нет, передает РИА Новости. По словам собеседника агентства, ополченцы перекрывали подступы к соляным шахтам Соледара, где расположены оружейные склады, чтобы не позволить национальной гвардии добраться до оружия. Представитель ополчения уточнил, что склады остались с советских времен и на них хранится в основном снятое с производства или устаревшее оружие (например «Маузеры», «Кольты», пулеметы Дегтярева, пистолеты-пулеметы ППШ), но в больших количествах.
С уважением.
