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”.
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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.
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.
That’s like ten small nukes.
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.
Competent being the key word in that sentence, and not an accurate one based on the last few years of intel.
They may not have enough manpower to guard a more distributed site, especially if they’re afraid of internal groups seizing some of it.
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.
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?
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…
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
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.
Violated their air space byotch….
You cannot ask for a serious source and then link the BBC.
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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.
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.
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.
Ignore IndustryStandard, they’re an idiot.
Nice cop-out pretending you cannot read the headline.
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 :)
do putler next
And his puppet
Juicy target and hopefully the shrapnel flew fucking everywhere.
I hope the shrapnel flew everywhere. Kudos to Ukrainian drone pilots. Fuck the Muscovites and their foreign supporters.
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.
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.
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.
I enjoy when the news headlines remind us they CAN be good
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
Don’t forget that artillery shells need charges to work. And these weight more than the actual shell.
I’d like to know how this converts to Beirut port blasts.
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
Blow up 2 more and be done with it
The AI hate is real
In an attempt to be more moderate: i think it is impolite to regurgitate the words of an LLM in a forum where we are expecting the dialogue to be between humans.
Why do I trust a LLM more than humans? Because the LLM answers me instantly what I want to know. The human changes the subject and then after 10 interactions, they just ghost you.
It answers you instantly, but you have no way of knowing the veracity of that answer. It will answer you instantly even if there is no answer.
Is trust the right word there? Maybe interact with, value, or use?
People are highly biased. Le chat mistral gives me the whole story.
If I ask a marxist and a libertarian the same question, I get two completely different answers.
I cannot trust people, such a small selection of data.
I use LLM to give me a summary of all of the data and all of the opinions.
That’s fair, just realize some of us are tired of online pessimism to such a degree that an AI - telling me there are in fact potential solutions and to keep trying - is actually good for our mental health. I only use Perplexity for research and musings that I sometimes post here to be discussed, not to completely replace human interaction on the Fediverse.
They literally only used it to help attempt to calculate the value, said they used AI to do so. There’s no excuse besides people see Ai and hate.
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.
Must have been one hell of a fireworks show, good hunting finding the next one.
Slava Ukraini
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This fucking rules. Eat poo, Shittin.
Good.
Excellent news! Slava Ukraini!
oh look they picked a new pope already
Nice
Thank you for this glorious news! I love it!
