Zapad drills and a deadly Dnipro blast: 16 September 2021
A look back at two security-related reports that surfaced in the days leading up to 16 September 2021, one from Ukraine and one from the Russia-Belarus exercises.
What did the security news look like on 16 September 2021? Two reports from the previous day, 15 September, framed it: one from inside Ukraine, the other from the military exercises next door.
In the central part of Dnipro, a car exploded on 15 September. Two people were killed: Oleksii Kavlak, a veteran of the Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO), and Daria Hrechishcheva, a spokeswoman for the State Emergency Service. Law enforcement officers described the blast as a terrorist act.
The same day, Russia showed unmanned ground vehicles operating within combat formations during the weeklong Zapad joint military exercises with Belarus. Two vehicles were demonstrated. The Uran-9 is a tracked vehicle carrying a 30 mm autocannon, a machine gun, anti-tank missiles and a flamethrower. The Nerekhta carries a mounted machine gun and a grenade launcher, and also has cargo capacity.
The two reports were unrelated in what they described, but both were part of the news picture of those days: a fatal explosion in a Ukrainian city, and a display of robotic combat vehicles during the exercises.
