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.
oh look they picked a new pope already
Excellent news! Slava Ukraini!
Well someone isn’t getting their Christmas bonus (their family can live)
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?
264.000.000kg/(45kg/unit) = around 5.866.666 units? Just wanted to have the number so others see the impact.
5.866.666 That is ~587 days worth of munitions if 10k a day is a good info mentioned above. bonkers
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!
Love how this is downvoted only for another thread to come to pretty much the same conclusion lol
The AI hate is real
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.
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.
Don’t you hate on donkeys! They are an excellent mean of transportation on tough terrain. I don’t know in what context russia uses them, but the US do so too :D
And they’re cute too although some can be mean as fuck…
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.
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”.
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
small wins like this
This is a medium to large win.
Just FYI, even general Ben Hodges says they are in a stalemate now.
Stalemate means Ukraine is fucked because a war of attrition potentially without US support doesn’t look good for them at all
Like, it’s amazing they managed to hold shit together for all this time and all, but damn they’re looking pretty fucked ngl
agreed, plus as it stands they’re actually somewhat on track for the “Russian disinformation” leaked 100 day peace plan
I’d assume because we are allied with Ukraine, and you’d see the opposite in Russia.
The Trump administration is very obviously not allied with Ukraine.
Mostly since the oligarchs in the western camp wants you to see their propaganda. It would be the other way around if you relocated. But if you really want you can find better sources.
Link some of those sources then.
Nah , you got internet. Do some work to keep yourself informed. I think it’s funny that this is the line here and at the same time negotiating deal is better for Russia than they suggested themselves multiple times. It’s in the mainstream now so you shouldn’t have any issues finding it. But I’m sure your copium can make the coup regime in ukraine winners here as well lol
In other words, you don’t have those sources.
It’s always the shadiest, most conspiratorial people that refuse to provide sources and say “jUsT gOoGLe iT”.
Provide sources or you simply will not be taken seriously, and overall look like an embarrassment.
Nah not really it’s mostly sad conspiracy people that follow propaganda and take it for facts. Do some work you can do it.
I’m happy to discuss the fact that the start of the leaked negotiatings are better than what Russia’s demands was before.
If you don’t believe sure , you will just need to wait until it’s undeniable. But as said I’m sure even if Ukraine was flattened and a nuclear wasteland it would be a win for you somehow.
It is not up to us to provide sources to your claim.
Just admit you don’t have any sources and all of it was bullshit.
This is evidence that the white house is riddled with Russian plants/propaganda not that the reality on the front is worse for Ukraine than we thought.
We always knew it was bad. It has never been good for Ukraine. If it ever gets good for Ukraine you will see Russians retreating. Nobody knows where that point is, but they are almost certainly closer today than they were a year ago.
Must have been one hell of a fireworks show, good hunting finding the next one.
Slava Ukraini
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Business insider has videos of the explosion.
“According to preliminary information, there are no casualties,” the ministry said in a statement posted to Telegram. “The cause of the fire is a violation of safety requirements when working with explosive materials.”
The article also says Ukraine hasn’t taken credit for the explosion, and that Russia has had accidents like this in the past.
Fuck Russia and all that, but now I’m thinking OP is full of shit.
Rusky spin obviously
Invaders out of Ukraine.
You love to see it!
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.
they’ve torn through a tremendous amount of the soviet reserve hardware they had.
but also have lost over a hundred thousand people, which is gonna hurt any workforce.
woohoo keep going Ukraine!
wasn’t it like 1 million? i know it differs on how you count it, and the wounded and all, but 100k, while a lot, is one tenth of the reported numbers since the beginning.
it’s very hard to tell, I’m probably out of date on my numbers as well.
but teeeeeechnically, it’s over a hundred thou so… “rightish?” :D
technically correct, the best kind of correct :D
I hope the shrapnel flew everywhere. Kudos to Ukrainian drone pilots. Fuck the Muscovites and their foreign supporters.
Thank you for this glorious news! I love it!
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?
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
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…
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.
Why am I now picturing a chain smoking Forrest Gump? “Life is like a pack of cigarettes, you never know what’s gonna blow up.”
Same guy who removes the safety rails around balconies
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.
Violated their air space byotch….
You cannot ask for a serious source and then link the BBC.
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.
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 :)
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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.
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)
Ha. They don’t write- they wait to be given their talking points, and parrot them until new ones are issued.
Did you find that Hamas base under the hospital yet?
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.
Why patch out a bug that’s working in our favor?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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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)
someone had set money aside
That’s a very nice way to say “embezzle”.
A bullet train, you say?
[email protected] breaks down the door
-
But you can save money by putting all of them in one place
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.
Competent being the key word in that sentence, and not an accurate one based on the last few years of intel.
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.
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.
I think they meant 100% of the explosions were munitions, not 100% of the munitions exploded. 'Twas a joke.
