Another mystery fire breaks out in Russia: Huge blaze at industrial zone adds to speculation over Ukrainian 'sabotage'

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A mysterious fire has broken out in a Russian industrial zone today, amid mounting suspicion Ukraine is targeting Russian infrastructure.

The most recent fire broke out east of Moscow, one of a series of suspected incidents of sabotage reported within Russia over the past few weeks.

Footage emerged of a large fire in the Dzerzhinsky industrial zone in the Nizhny Novgorod region, deep within the country.

Speculation that Ukraine is responsible for the fires has abounded since the 'accidents' began, though Kyiv has not claimed responsibility for the damage.

Over a dozen fires in Russia have been reported since the war in Ukraine broke out, with the amount of incidents increasing over the past few weeks as Russia loses ground in Western Ukraine.

Yesterday, Nexta reported a fire at a four-floor pro-Kremlin publishing warehouse. The fire reportedly broke out around midnight in the Bogorodsk urban district of the Moscow region, said Newsweek.

Fire fighters were called in at 3am, reported the Moscow Times.

The fire-fighters extinguished the blaze just over four hours later, a spokesperson for the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry told the state-run news agency TASS. 

Prosveshchenie, meaning 'Enlightenment' in Russian, publishes educational books for Russian schools, according to Nexta.

The publisher's management had ordered staff to reduce mentions of Ukraine in its text books, Anton Gerashchenko, adviser to Ukraine's minister of internal affairs, said on his Telegram channel.

Employees were also told they will be dismissed for expressing any anti-war opinion on social media. 

Mediazona, one of the few Russian news sites that refused to call  Russia's invasion of Ukraine a 'special operation', said Prosveshcheniye was the USSR's principal educational publisher, but then it lost its textbook monopoly in 1991.

Arkady Rotenberg — an old friend of Vladimir Putin's who claimed he was the owner of the notorious £1bn Black Sea palace after Alexei Navalny shared a video of the mansion — allegedly helped the Olma Publishing Group acquire Prosveshchenie in 2011.

Rotenberg became the chairman of the board of directors and co-owner of Prosveshchenie in 2013.

Upon his appointment to the board, the Russian state become the publishing house's biggest customer, reported Meduza.

The publishing house now receives almost 80 percent of the state money that goes to buy textbooks.

Anton Gerashchenko, adviser to the Ukrainian foreign ministry, tweeted out footage which he claimed showed the arms factory in Perm - 700 miles to the east of Moscow - burning, claiming a 'powerful' explosion had struck it.

Russia acknowledged a fire took place at the factory around 8pm Sunday but did not say what caused the 'accident'.

The Perm factory is used to make rockets for Russian artillery systems of the kind being used to bomb Ukrainian cities and troops.

Fires are also raging in Siberia, though observers suggested the fires are caused by seasonal conditions rather than direct sabotage, likely made worse by a lack of workers available to fight the fire.

At the same time, British intelligence said that more than quarter of Russia's invasion force is now out of action after suffering heavy losses and will take years to recover.

It is not known how many of the incidents are accidents or a result of discontent within the Russian population, as the country's reporting restrictions make verification difficult.

Anonymous, a hacker group made up of international activists, posted a map detailing 23 previous 'special combustion operations' within Russia which are seemingly related to the Ukrainian war, making 25 in total, though MailOnline is not able to independently verify such claims.

The map shows fires deep within Russia, with one incident reported in the far eastern city of Ussuriysk, around 9,729km away from the Ukrainian border.

Russia last month accused Kyiv of using helicopters to blow up a fuel dump in Belgorod, which Ukraine denied.

Without directly admitting responsibility, Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said it was 'karma' for Russia and said they deserved to learn about 'demilitarisation' in a pointed swipe at Putin's supposed war aims. 

Since then, two fuel dumps, and ammunition dump, and a railway bridge have been destroyed.

A fire broke out at a military facility in the region yesterday, while a blaze also destroyed a base in Tver, near Moscow, two weeks ago. 

Overnight Monday, air defence systems were once again active over Belgorod with two explosions heard as lights appeared in the sky.

The bright marks appear to have been a trail of flares left behind by either jets or helicopters flying over the city, in what observers speculated could be another Ukrainian attack.

Belgorod Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov sought to dispel those rumours, saying the flares were fired by Russia jets and that the blasts had caused no damage.

However, he did not explain what the blasts were, why they had taken place over Russia rather than over Ukraine, or why Russian jet would be letting off flares above one of their own cities where they should be protected by air defences.

Flares are designed to distract heat-seeking rockets, and are generally only used over enemy territory where aircraft are in danger of being hit.

The Russian Defence Ministry said its forces struck dozens of military targets in eastern Ukraine in the past 24 hours, including concentrations of troops and weapons and an ammunition depot near Chervone in the Zaporizhzhia region.

The information could not be independently verified.