Apparently, Ukrainian drones pushed through and started a chain reaction.
Explosions reportedly continued for hours, and authorities evacuated nearby settlements. Initial reports indicate that the site, previously protected by one of Russia’s densest air defense networks, suffered catastrophic damage.
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:
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yet another time, someone had set money aside for personal use, consequently the bunkers had doors made of plywood or roofing tin :)
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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)
A bullet train, you say?
!fuckcars@lemmy.world breaks down the door
someone had set money aside
That’s a very nice way to say “embezzle”.
-
In their infinite wisdom they apparently stored a bunch of ammunitions out in the open.
Russia has a long history of open storage at these sites. They also lost a ton of bunkers a few months ago at other sites. So they likely did not have much of an option, and they chose open store it at their “best defended” base.
I personally would bet that site was overstocked as it was likely the primary ammo dump by default. All of the newly manufactured missiles and shells going there directly from the factories.
It could hold that much, but according to Ukraine it was 105000 tons that exploded. Huge success though.
I’m making a note here.
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
I guess we don’t have an accurate source on what percentage of munitions his was.
I would confidently assume 100% of it was munitions
If you think of the fill percentage, I think that’s too optimistic, since they’re in a war. There is constant demand. However, even 50% would be an extremely big amount, and relieve Ukrainians from a lot of pressure (last year, when a similar thing happened in Toropets, it had effects on the front within weeks). This time, from the videos I saw, there was enough to keep detonating for a long time.
Whatever the fill percentage and loss percentage, the site is closed for a long time - if something remains, it cannot be reached, it has to be examined and re-certified. But more likely, very little will remain.
In the coming days, satellite photos will tell what the situation is.
Competent being the key word in that sentence, and not an accurate one based on the last few years of intel.
I assume that bunkers protect you from a chain reaction, but that at some point the explosion is big enough that a chain reaction is exactly what you get.
This definitely seems like it would have been big enough to cause a chain reaction (and/or big enough to show that a chain reaction happened). If so, I wonder what fraction of bunkers exploded. I’m glad we live in an age of civilian satellites, so it’s probably just a matter of time before we get to see the damage for ourselves.
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
Sensationalism is the kind of red flags I run away from… Obviously the BBC have their own political slant, but I’m aware of it and can correct for that. Same when I read an article from something like Fox “News”.
But if you give me some unknown site of which I don’t know the background and more importantly, who’s funding it, then it’s useless to me and I’ll just add it to the bunch of misinformation machines I run into everyday.
The safety violation will be that the ammunition wasn’t stored in the proper storage bunkers and was therefore vulnerable to an attack setting off the whole lot.
…and then an attack did just that.
Alexander Avdeyev also threatened journalists and residents with fines if they shared unofficial information about the blast.
ah yes, i always threaten journalists when there’s nothing to report
You cannot ask for a serious source and then link the BBC.
Ah yes, the ol’ “Anything I don’t agree with is biased.”
Do you right wing idiots ever get together and write new scripts? Your reruns are getting tired.
I think it’s more that the British Press in general is pretty political, heavy on the spin and hence one of the least trusted in Europe by the locals themselves.
When it comes to the Russian Invasion of Ukraine - which is very politically and geostrategically significant for the UK government - the level and direction of the bias of the BBC is no different from the Euromaidan Press hence for those who think the latter is not a “serious source”, the former is also not a “serious source”.
Mind you, on different subjects which are not related to the Russian Invasion of Ukraine (such as the Israeli Genocide in Gaza) I fully expect the Euromaidan Press is often less biased (on this specific example, significantly so) than the BBC.
Just because the BBC is posh doesn’t mean they’re honest (in fact from my own experience living in the UK, posh more often than not means fake. manipulative and dishonest)
Hi, I’m a left wing rather than right wing idiot. The BBC has proved itself an unreliable source plenty of times. They’re beholden to political influence (see today’s story about one of their staff not being allowed to talk about heat pumps because it’s a “political issue”)
And what sort of bias do they have? Their directors and senior journalists are time-servers and toadies put in place by the Conservatives during their 14 years in power. Starmer has not cleaned up that mess. Gilligan: Tory. Kuenssberg: Tory and Boris Johnson admirer. There are few centre-left voices and none at all speaking from a more leftist point of view.
Did you find that Hamas base under the hospital yet?
Ha. They don’t write- they wait to be given their talking points, and parrot them until new ones are issued.
Of course I can, look, I just did.
At that point stick with Euromaidan. They are more credible than BBC.
On your word?
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Good link thanks, let me book mark it if I ever need to waste someone’s time.
Nice cop-out pretending you cannot read the headline.
Ignore IndustryStandard, they’re an idiot.
Thx for the superior one
Those media bias folks hate all sources so whichever you link to someone else is gonna hate on (for good reason perhaps!)—but 2 is better than 1 :)
Violated their air space byotch….
This fucking rules. Eat poo, Shittin.
Must have been one hell of a fireworks show, good hunting finding the next one.
Slava Ukraini
deleted by creator
oh look they picked a new pope already
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?
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.
“only” 😁
Indeed a decent hit!
I’d like to know how this converts to Beirut port blasts.
It feels like I’ve read how Russia have taken massive losses every day for over two years now. In my book, if you take “massive losses” every day for two years that would mean there’s basically nothing left. I get that there daily numbers probably are massive by comparison, but still.
Haven’t checked numbers recently but it’s at or nearing a million killed and wounded. Not a great number but they have plenty more.
They have people sure, but the logistics to feed and arm them? That I’m not sure
Haha, they haven’t had that since day 1. They just need to get shot and reveal Ukrainian locations so they can bombard them with artillery. That’s it, that’s all they’ve ever done.
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 sorryIt 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
GOU Type II Sorry
ROU Geneva Suggestions
LOU Trench Raid
GCU I Never Agreed to a Truce
The American government has already shown they’re happy to round up people who look like "foreign enemies"whether they are or not. If your enemy has almost the exact same demographics, all of a sudden there’s probable cause to detain anyone (I know, it’s not like they care about any due process but everything else feels like we’re in make believe land anyways).
So Stalin revisited.
This is exactly why Zelensky is saying Ukraine needs to be made whole for sustainble peace. Bitter Ukrainians will not let go otherwise and Russia is such an easy target for them. How will you keep peace agreement when every Russian car is a bomb now?
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.
Russians are a lost cause. 3 years and Putin is still unopposed and every single ruzki is silent doing nothing. Putin might as well eat babies for breakfast and no one would have the balls to do anything about it so sense is completely lost here.
Russian culture is beyond redemption and I say this with a heavy heart as a Russian language speaker. So incredibly disappointed.
They aren’t opposing or we don’t know they are? Many people ask “why the US citizen aren’t doing anything against Trump?” when they have been protesting for weeks.
Nah Russians are just incredibly whipped. It’s a society of given up losers.
These are the people who couldn’t be stopped drinking rocket fuel so a poison additive had to be included, the fuck is a patch gonna do?
Their supersonic bombers had ethanol for cooling.
So their crews would take off, then get tanked.
While carrying live nukes.
Between the engineers and the aircrews, just geniuses all around.
Why patch out a bug that’s working in our favor?
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.
Honestly, hitting the Kremlin may actually cause nuclear escalation. Putin’s ego would not survive the hit. Zelenskyy probably realizes this too, he’s not stupid.
Idk at this point, what would Russia have to gain for radiating out Ukraine? Don’t they want that land?
It’s the age old principle of “If I can’t have it, nobody can” that I’m afraid of the most. Anyone reasonable wouldn’t go by it, but if Putin is afraid he’s gonna die, he might as well.
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.
Wasn’t it around 10.000 rounds of artillery at the start of thf full scale invasion and now it’s a bit lower like 5-6.000?
That may very well be. Ukraine managed to destroy quite a lot depots already, as far as I remember. And Russia had already problems of keeping up either way because of lack of specific resources, I think.
Something along that line. This display is too small and my fingers too fat to actually check that right now.
Ukraine themselves reports it at 105ktons of munitions destroyed. And honestly, I trust their remote intel better than russias direct intel on how much it was. Hehe.
I hope the shrapnel flew everywhere. Kudos to Ukrainian drone pilots. Fuck the Muscovites and their foreign supporters.
Good.
