They may have been launched from within Russia.

I guess we don’t have an accurate source on what percentage of munitions his was.

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)

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.

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.

It could hold that much, but according to Ukraine it was 105000 tons that exploded. Huge success though.

<img alt="" src="https://programming.dev/pictrs/image/e3ea60ff-9243-41c7-8c7b-0e6d2fbbb401.jpeg">

In their infinite wisdom they apparently stored a bunch of ammunitions out in the open.

Competent being the key word in that sentence, and not an accurate one based on the last few years of intel.

But you can save money by putting all of them in one place

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.

And his puppet

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.

You cannot ask for a serious source and then link the BBC.

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…

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….

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

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?

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.

Why patch out a bug that’s working in our favor?

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!

No, I love to hear about ammo dumps blowing up.

Some conscripts getting his by a drone, struggling to pull themselves upright so they can end their suffering with their own rifles?

That is what I truly love to see.

Pardon me while I go rub one out.

“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.

I’d assume because we are allied with Ukraine, and you’d see the opposite in Russia.

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”.

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.

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 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.

Negative stuff does come out from time to time, especially when Russia makes big advances, but the underdog effect means that Ukraine typically gets more attention and media coverage for their successful military operations. Russia has had scant few successes over the past few years so they are spreading propaganda that make them look as if they are winning which is getting picked up and parroted by Trump and other neo-fascists in the West.

I see negative stuff often, it’s just that there’s more positive lately. Also, the negative is neglected on purpose, because saying Ukraine is losing, would become a self-fulfilling future.

Because Russia doesn’t go after strategic targets. Only civilians and because (at least in Europe) the vast majority of people fucking hate Russia. Especially countries that share a border with them or used to be part of the soviet union. Nobody hates Russia more than Russians who have managed to get out though. I had a russian colleague who basically gave up on seeing his family until after the war was over and he has no intention of ever living there after.

Invaders must die.

If they left they wouldn’t learn the lesson.

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.

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.

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.

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.