Ottawa Citizen reports that Ukrainian Defence Minister Stepan Poltorak has announced that he has been negotiating with Canadian Minister of National Defense Harjit Sajjan concerning the possibility of building a new ammunition plant in Ukraine with the help of Canada. The Ukrainian side wants Canada to get involved in the construction of the plant and later joint production of ammunition.

A Defence Cooperation Agreement between two nations was signed. However, the final decision concerning the Canadian participation in ammunition plant building has to be made yet. Sajjan told the press that Canada is not looking to just sell armament and equipment to Ukraine but to help the Ukrainian armed forces to modernize and “build the capacity”.

There is no information yet concerning what calibers of ammunition they plan to manufacture in the future plant.

A couple of days ago from the meeting of defense ministers, there was an explosion in arguably the largest Ukrainian ammunition depot near Kalinovka town. Reportedly, there were 188,000 tons of munitions stored there including rockets for various multiple rocket launching systems such as BM-30 Smerch, BM-27 Uragan, and BM-21 Grad. Here is some footage of the explosion:

Whether explosion of the munitions depot and the negotiations concerning the building of a new ammunition plant are somehow correlated is unknown, too.