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I'm pretty sure competent militaries store their munitions in networks of dozens if not hundreds of earthen bunkers per site, specifically so shit like this can't happen.
264 kilotons is a fuckload of bombs.
Competent ones, I think they do.
Possible explanations:
yet another time, someone had set money aside for personal use, consequently the bunkers had doors made of plywood or roofing tin :)
arrival of drones was timed to match the loading / unloading of an ammunition train (that's when even competent militaries have to bring their stuff out)
In their infinite wisdom they apparently stored a bunch of ammunitions out in the open.
It could hold that much, but according to Ukraine it was 105000 tons that exploded. Huge success though.
Assuming I'm looking at the right thing on google maps, it does seem to be a lot of earthen bunkers with berms separating them. There are also quite a few free standing buildings scattered around.
I looked at Hawthorne Army Depot (US) to compare, and that one is a lot less dense, but it's absolutely gigantic.
That's like ten small nukes.
They may not have enough manpower to guard a more distributed site, especially if they’re afraid of internal groups seizing some of it.
But you can save money by putting all of them in one place
Can we have links to more reputable, known news sites please? Never heard of that one. Here's the BBC.
Russia's military blamed the blast on ammunition which had detonated after the storage building caught fire due to a "violation of safety requirements".
Huh, I suppose maybe a drone-sized violation?
Have seen euromaidanpress articles before, I think they're legit if not a bit sensationalist and obviously very pro-Ukraine.
And of course Russia blames a smoooooking incident. There's this one Russian guy who just smokes everywhere he shouldn't. Munition storages, aviation bases, flagship Moskva...
Same guy who removes the safety rails around balconies
This fucking rules. Eat poo, Shittin.
Must have been one hell of a fireworks show, good hunting finding the next one.
Slava Ukraini
I hace no idea how serious a blow this is. Can anyone provide any sense of magnitude for these 264 000 tons of munitions? Like how big a chunk of total ammunition stockpile woukd this be? How big is it compared to current manufacturing rate?
It's not that easy to calculate as "munitions" can be anything from artillery shells to ballistic missiles.
If we assume it's mostly/all artillery shells, it's roughly one month of production. Russia currently produces 250.000 units of artillery shells per month if everything goes right. Russia uses roughly 10.000 of them per day, so it would be almost one months worth of combat.
If the stockpile contained more of glide bombs and ballistic missiles, the damage is even worse because they are significantly more expensive to produce.
But a unit of artillery shell doesn't weigh a ton.
True, for some reason, I thought of units instead of tons lmao.
The damage is significantly worse then, probably months worth of production, maybe even a year. A standard shell weighs like what, 45kg?
Chatgpt thoughts.. With some spot checking on the math seems right.. Here’s the context of 250,000 tonnes of munitions from the Russian side:
Russia fires 10,000 to 60,000 artillery shells per day, depending on the front.
A typical 152mm shell weighs around 40–43 kg.
That means Russia can burn through 1,800+ tonnes per day in peak operations.
Russian production in 2023 was estimated at 2 million+ shells per year.
Russia also draws from Soviet-era stockpiles and imports from North Korea and Iran.
Russian doctrine favors volume over precision. Their artillery-centric strategy relies on overwhelming force rather than accuracy.
250,000 tonnes equates to roughly 6 million shells.
For Russia, that’s only about 3–5 months of usage at current intensity.
oh look they picked a new pope already
Is there a particular reason I only ever see ukraine positive war stuff? And when I see negative ukraine war stuff it's coming out of trumps mouth?
No, I don't follow it religiously.
Basically? Wartime propaganda
Ukraine has been doing individual, small wins like this and they obviously toot their horn when it happens
But on a large scale, Ukraine has been slowly losing ground
Russia's apparent war plan involves lots of slow attritional fighting, which isn't flashy and rarely results in a "Win". Not to mention we kind of do see the russian equivalent of this attack (Bombing hospitals, shopping malls and power infrastructure) reported on, it's just not considered a win to kill civilians in the west.
A view I agree with not only on the basis of valuing peace, life and the safety of noncombatants but also on the basis of it not being an effective way to win a war, e.g Korean war, Vietnam war, or the near leveling of London and large swaths of europe in Ww2. Strategic bombing of civilian assets just makes the people being bombed more likely to fight back and willing to endure higher casualties on the front lines.
Fun tidbit, this depot explosion was initially claimed to be "Negligence and mishandling of munitions" by the kremlin, which along with "Smoking accident" is basically shorthand for "Was hit by a drone but we don't want to let our people know that we aren't able to keep the war away from them".
Russia had no significant gains over the last years with half a million casualties (KIA, MIA, lost limbs, war prisoners), the logistics is crumbling — they use donkeys, the economy and demographic are in the toilet but Russia is extremely good at spreading propaganda. So much so that the US admin is parroting it and putting pressure on Ukraine.
Just to add, Ukrainians information is remarkably reliant and verifiable, the russian information is kremlin lies, so from the start the russian part is just not very interesing at all.
Also obviously they both talk about good things for them, classic war propaganda.
Add in that Ukraine is the (incredible) underdog and here we are.
Kirzhach is on the far side of Moscow from Ukraine. Did the drones fly over Moscow to reach it, or did they take a longer route?
They may have been launched from within Russia.
Yeah, that’s the fun part of going to war with an adversary that was formerly a part of your empire: they have A LOT of people that can convincingly pass as your nationals - not to mention, there’s a small but meaningful percentage of your own citizens that are going to be sympathetic enough (due to family, social, and cultural connections) to that adversary that they’d be willing to act on their behalf for stuff like this.
This is what the Americans who support a war with Canada don’t realize.
As an American, it is utterly insane to me that there’s a good number of Americans that are just like “huh yeah I guess we’re gonna bomb Canada to make them do what we want”.
Then again, there’s a lot of utterly insane things happening these days.
A lot of my countrymen are gonna be finding out about Type II “sorry” if we try any military adventurism. And I’m sure Greenlanders would welcome an expeditionary force of Finns, considering their rich and storied experience (5-6.5:1 KD ratio; ~5:1 overall casualty ratio, without even considering the Continuation War).
Type II “sorry”
Love this, and now that I see your username I find this quote has a Banksian quality to it.
Type I: I'm sorry
Type II: You'll be sorry
It is absolutely an Iain M Banks reference (and thank you for noticing <3). I identify as a GSV.
Type II (alternate): said cheekily, immediately after finding a loophole in the Geneva Convention
If Putler had any sense, he’d spend a fraction of his military budget on making nicotine patches available for free to his orcs. That would pay for itself in no time.
Excellent news! Slava Ukraini!
I enjoy when the news headlines remind us they CAN be good
Initial reports indicate that the site, previously protected by one of Russia’s densest air defense networks, suffered catastrophic damage.
Good chance Ukraine could hit the Kremlin if they wanted to. They have drones with the 500 mile range to pull it off, and Russian air defense has become a joke. The only thing that's been stopping them was US worries about actions like that causing escalation. Ukraine has had less and less reason to care what the US thinks of late.
What, like, percent of stored munitions would this likely be? How impactful of a destruction is it?
It's hard to find reliable data about that. The last good information is from 2022 and says that Russia has stored around 1 million tons of ammunition. That would mean Ukraine just wiped out 26% of everything Russia had.
However, since it is very likely that Russia has produced a lot more since the war began, it's hard to tell how much they actually lost today.
The only other number I could find was one that says that each day Russia uses around 26000 rounds of ammunition (artillery).
And since I'm a lazy fuck that is already lying in bed and I only have my smartphone here, I'll let AI do the estimates and calculations.
Under the premise that most things in that depot was artillery ammo, and we roughly know the weight of a round and as said how much they use per day we can estimate they burn through 1218 tons of ammunition per day.
That would mean Ukraine just destroyed around 220 days of ammunition.
But as said, that's just a wild guess based on some very vague numbers that I don't have double checked now.
Thank you for this glorious news! I love it!
I hope the shrapnel flew everywhere. Kudos to Ukrainian drone pilots. Fuck the Muscovites and their foreign supporters.
Good.
If Russia truly has fucked its entire workforce into conscription, they may have to pull forces off the frontlines in order to manufacture replacements for lost equipment and munitions.