Blast that injured two was 'terrorist attack', Ukrainian authorities say

Two police officers have been injured in an explosion that authorities say was a "terrorist act" in the town of Bucha near the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv.

An explosion occurred on a residential street in the early hours of Monday. When police arrived at the site, a second blast took place, injuring two officers.

Police arrested a 21-year-old local resident who they say was recruited online to carry out the two explosions.

They did not share what platform the suspect had been been recruited on, but a security source told the BBC it had been done through the online game World of Tanks.

"He says he just wanted to make some money and was promised 25,000 hryvnyas [£450; $570] for each blast," the Kyiv Region Criminal Iinvestigations Directorate head, Andriy Kravchuk, told the media at the scene.

The Ukrainian security service SBU issued a statement calling the suspect "a Russian agent".

But police - who are working to establish who recruited the suspect - are not confirming any links to Russia.

They released footage of the suspect being questioned, in which he says he was blackmailed into planting the explosives.

The man said those he communicated with over the internet told him they knew where his mother was and could "see her from a drone".

"Either you do what we tell you or something happens to your mum," they allegedly told him.

The suspect has been charged with terrorism.

Kravchuk said the two police officers who were injured in the explosions received injuries to their limbs, which are not believed to be life-threatening.

Local resident Viktoria Ivasyshyna, 21, told the BBC she heard "a very loud explosion and I immediately realised that this was not civilian or an industrial accident."

"We woke up to a powerful explosion. At first we thought someone had a gas explosion in their apartment, but it turned out that it wasn't," a resident of the house in Bucha outside which blasts occurred told the local town council.

In a post on Facebook, the council also quoted eyewitnesses as saying that the shock wave was palpable, and all emergency services quickly arrived at the scene.

This follows a string of similar incidents across Ukraine this year. In the western city of Lviv on 22 February, a police officer was killed and more than 20 people were injured as a bomb went off after police arrived to look into a report of an earlier explosion.

Police say the explosives in Lviv were planted by a Ukrainian woman who had been paid by Russian secret services.

On 23 February, a bomb targeted police who had gathered at a disused police station in the southern city of Mykolayiv, injuring seven. On the same day, there was a blast outside a police station in Dnipro, a city in central Ukraine.