On the night between Friday and Saturday the sky over central Bulgaria turned orange. A fire broke out at the ammunition depot of the company EMCO, in the Dryanovo region, followed by a series of detonations. Nobody was injured, staff were evacuated, police sealed off access. So much for the official version.

The problem is that this is not the first time. Nor the second. This is the second serious incident at facilities of the same company in a little over a month - on 10 August another EMCO depot burned near Belitsa. The army later collected 60 unexploded pieces of ammunition and around two tonnes of metal debris scattered around the site. The investigation into that case is still not finished.

The company is not waiting for an investigation - it says sabotage outright

While the state carefully says it is "examining several possibilities", EMCO went a step further and openly stated that the new explosion was sabotage. Human error, the company says, is entirely ruled out. According to them, the depot that was hit had not been used for months, and this year alone it passed seven state inspections - the last one about twenty days before the explosion.

Bulgarian Interior Minister Ivan Demerdzhiev does not rule out external interference. But his sharper sentence is the one that tells the real story: there is, he says, negligence in the conditions under which explosives and ammunition are stored. Twenty inspections passed, and the depot burned anyway. Which possibility is worse for the state - that somebody got in from outside, or that the inspections exist only on paper?

Why this company, and why again

EMCO is not a random company. It is run by Bulgarian arms dealer Emilian Gebrev, and as far back as late 2014 and early 2015 the firm was supplying Ukraine with 120 to 152 millimetre calibre ammunition - precisely for the Soviet-origin weapons the Ukrainian army uses. Gebrev survived a poisoning attempt in 2015. Bulgarian authorities later charged three Russian citizens suspected of links to Russian military intelligence. Moscow rejects the accusations.

In 2024 Bulgaria issued arrest warrants for six Russian citizens suspected over earlier explosions at EMCO depots between 2011 and 2020. Those facilities also held ammunition destined for export to Ukraine and Georgia. Prosecutors said at the time that there were grounds to examine a connection between the explosions in Bulgaria, the attempt on Gebrev's life and the explosions at the Czech depots in Vrbetice in 2014.

In other words: this is not a new story. It is the same story repeating for fifteen years in the same industry, in the same country, with the same type of facility. EMCO itself claims that more than ten similar incidents have been recorded in the Bulgarian defence sector since 2011.

The Balkans are close to the front, they just do not want to admit it

Bulgaria is a neighbouring country. Its defence sector is one of Ukraine's largest suppliers in Europe, and its depots are burning for the second time in a month. If this is sabotage, it means the war does not end at the Ukrainian border - it spreads along the logistics lines, and the logistics lines run through our neighbourhood.

The Interior Ministry is now announcing checks on security and storage conditions for explosives at other similar facilities. The question that stays unanswered is simpler: if seven inspections a year found nothing, what exactly is the eighth going to find?