Local residents report powerful explosions near the Belbek military airport in Sevastopol. Information about the explosions that appeared on the network was confirmed to The Insider by two eyewitnesses in the resort village of Lyubimovka, which is located about 50 kilometers from the airfield. The "Governor" of Sevastopol, Mikhail Razvozhaev, announced the work of air defense.

According to him, a drone was shot down near the airport.

"Belbek" - a military airfield in Sevastopol, it was captured on February 28, 2014 - two weeks before the annexation of the peninsula. It was alleged that the airfield was taken over by "self-defense units" - Russian military in unmarked uniforms, the so-called "polite people".

Since 2015, they wanted to make Belbek the second civilian airport in Crimea, the reconstruction of the Sevastopol airport was supposed to be carried out by the Regional Construction Company, associated with businessman Arkady Rotenberg. In the same year, the airport received 14 charter passenger flights, but after that it was not used for civilian purposes. The publication "Military Industrial Courier" reported that the 38th Fighter Aviation Regiment was stationed at the airfield. It consists of two squadrons with Su-27SM3, Su-30M2, Su-27P, Su-27UB aircraft.

At the same time, billions of rubles were allocated from the Russian and subsidized Sevastopol budgets for the reconstruction of Belbek and its transformation into a full-fledged civil airport. In August 2017, the government of Sevastopol officially allocated 1.5 billion rubles for the project, in 2019 it was decided to allocate another 1.762 billion rubles as part of the Federal Target Program. At the end of March 2021, the Crimean pro-government media wrote that 1.8 billion rubles had been spent on construction since 2014. Initially, it was planned that Belbek would receive the first civilian flights in May 2022.