A massive overnight fire that sparked multiple secondary explosions has broken out at a private ammunition storage facility owned by Bulgarian defense contractor EMCO near the central Bulgarian village of Gorni Varpishta, leaving no casualties in its wake, and prompting an official investigation into the cause of the incident with sabotage at the top of the list of potential causes.
Gorni Varpishta sits roughly 170 kilometers east of Bulgaria’s capital city Sofia, and EMCO officials confirmed in an official statement that the facility had been inactive for several months ahead of the fire. The site also passed a full regulatory inspection just 20 days before the blaze, with inspectors confirming full compliance with all safety protocols. That finding, company representatives say, rules out any possibility of the fire being caused by human error.
Bulgaria’s Interior Minister Ivan Demerdzhiev confirmed that law enforcement and national security officials have not ruled out the possibility of outside interference, while EMCO has gone further, explicitly framing the incident as the latest in a long string of coordinated sabotage attacks targeting Bulgarian defense sector entities stretching back to 2011. “As the EU and Nato member state most severely affected by such actions, Bulgaria must join the collective effort to prevent and neutralise these attacks,” the company said in its public statement. The firm did not directly name a potential perpetrator, but context around the company’s operations points to a well-documented pattern of Russian interference targeting entities that supply arms to Ukraine.
EMCO is one of Bulgaria’s most prominent private defense firms, and its weaponry has been regularly supplied to Ukrainian forces fighting to repel Russia’s full-scale invasion launched in 2022. The company is owned by prominent Bulgarian arms dealer Emilian Gebrev, who Bulgarian prosecutors have confirmed was the target of a foiled Russian assassination plot more than a decade ago. In 2015, Gebrev, his son, and another EMCO employee were poisoned in an attempted killing; three Russian nationals were later charged in absentia for the crime by Bulgarian authorities.
This latest fire at an EMCO facility comes just one month after another blaze and series of explosions hit a separate EMCO ammunition warehouse in the same central Bulgarian region. It also aligns with what Western security officials describe as a dramatic escalation of Russian-led sabotage operations across European soil in recent months.
Just last week, German national security officials publicly confirmed that Russian intelligence was responsible for a drone attack on Leipzig Airport carried out in August, a claim Moscow has dismissed as “absurd”. Since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a wave of unexplained fires and blasts have hit defense-related facilities across the European continent, from Italy in the south to Estonia in the Baltic north. Multiple affected governments have directly attributed these incidents to Russian sabotage operations designed to disrupt arms flows to Ukraine.
Bulgaria, a NATO and EU member state that shares a border with both Ukraine and Turkey, has long been one of the most significant providers of legacy Soviet-style weaponry to Ukraine, much of which is compatible with Ukraine’s existing military arsenal. While the Bulgarian government recently paused state-owned arms shipments to Kyiv, private defense firms including EMCO continue to move weapons and ammunition to Ukrainian forces.