Don's Weekly, 23 September 2024: Part 3
by Donald HIll
(…continued from Part 2…)
***
Makiivka
In addition to losing Hostre, Heorhiivka also fell into Russian control. Ukraine was able to stop other large attacks.
The 33rd Brigade near Pobieda destroyed 16 armored vehicles in two days. Some of the kills came from a Milan ATGM hiding in the open. It has a range of 3,000 meters.
The 46th brigade sends a drone to deconstruct a Russian turtle tank.
(CAUTION: Infantry are attacked by drones). 35 armored vehicles and 9 tanks attacked Kostyantynivka. After 5 vehicles were destroyed, the Russians retreated and drones hunted the infantry from the destroyed vehicles, killing 30 of them.
***
Vuhledar
Russia took Mine No. 3. The Ukrainians heavily mined the 115 meter tower so the Russians had no other options but to bring it down. To the east of Mine No. 1, 13 Russian armored vehicles were destroyed or damaged. A Russian assault north of Prechystivka was stopped.
The Russians built a new rail line to provide an alternate route to the Kerch bridge. The first train to use the route left Mariupol with a flatbed car in front of the engine because partisans will sometimes put a mine on the track and the flatbed will detonate it.
***
Kherson
A Ukrainian interceptor appears to knock down a Russian reconnaissance drone through a collision and survive the attack.
***
Unknown Location
A Ukrainian drone hits a Russian soldier and doesn’t detonate, but the video keeps transmitting. Ukraine sent another drone.
When the Russians realize their vehicle is being tracked by a Ukrainian drone, they stop the vehicle to dismount and fire at it. The Ukrainian drone hits the vehicle, but it appears to be missing it’s munition.
***
Russia
According to the Russians, the Toropets ammo dump 470 km from Ukraine was hit by more than 100 drones. The secondary explosions are continuous, as viewed from 4200 meters away. According to TASS, each of the 92 individual bunkers could hold up to 240 tons for a total potential of 22,000 tons of stored ammo. Not all the ammo was inside the bunkers. Estimates of up to 8,000 tons may have been stored in the open. An Estonian intelligence official said that some of the ammo in the open had just been delivered by train and that 2-3 months of ammo was destroyed. That was just from the Toropets depot.
11 explosions registered from 2.5 to 2.8 on the Richter scale. Ukraine said the warehouses contained 122mm Grad rockets, 82mm artillery mines, S-300 and S-400 anti-aircraft missiles, Iskander ballistic missiles and North Korean KN23s. A Russian blogger claims that 200 soldiers are missing. An ammo train with over 50 cars was also present when the depot was hit. Indeed: it seems, Ukrainians are timing such attacks by arrivals of Russian ammunition trains: the open air storage of ammo and the loaded ammo train were much more vulnerable to the drones than the bunkers. The secondary explosions of the exposed ammo penetrated most of the bunkers.
Here are some views from Toropets (3 km away), neighboring communities and from space. And then hackers trolled the local municipality web site.
About 75% of the bunkers were destroyed. When it was built in 2018 the Russian Defense Ministry said it could withstand a nuclear explosion. A Deputy Defense Minister involved in the construction was arrested in July 2024 on corruption charges. The construction of the bunkers was substandard and an ammo depot in Kotovo (58.48363346878169, 33.49239236308424) is being built in the same way.
A lot of the munitions in the northern Toropets depot were stored in the open, not in bunkers. This is true of other depots, such as this one southeast of Bryansk.
16 km south of the Toropets North Ammunition Depot is the Toropets South Ammunition Depot that has the potential of holding 17,000 tons of ammo. It was also attacked last week and had its own dramatic explosions. A satellite image.
A depot in Tikhoretsk (45.885547955063906, 40.04169322412793), Krasnodarsk Krai, was also hit. One report said that two drones were intercepted and naturally their debris started the explosions, which could include North Korean missiles. This site can hold up to 12,000 tons of ammo. Some of the ammo was stored in the open. It is also a logistical hub and a train carrying 2,000 tons of North Korean ammo was present at the time of the attack. The fact that trains were present at two of the three depots when they were attacked is probably not a coincidence.
In the morning, secondary explosions at Tikhoretsk continued. Another rocket from Tikhoretsk landed 10 km away. And satellite images of the depot.
10 km southwest of the occupied city of Mariupol, a depot at Hlyboke was hit.
In the early summer of 2022, HIMARS arrived and dozens of large Russian ammo dumps were destroyed within the 80 km range of the weapon system. Large depots are a more efficient way to move ammo but they are also more vulnerable to attack. Russia responded by using more depots that were smaller, but they were attacked, too. Russia adjusted and dispersed their depots into even smaller depots within range of Ukrainian weapons. These smaller depots required a greater number of vehicles to transport the ammo, this at a time when Russian units are commandeering civilian vehicles because they are short of trucks. Besides destroying tons of ammo, the rate of ammo moving to the front slowed.
Ukrainian artillery extends the battle zone from the front line to about 30 km behind the zero line. HIMARS and MLRS extended that range to about 80 km. Ukraine’s drones have extended the battle zone as far as 1800 km away. Oil refineries, fuel depots, airbase depots and large depots supporting ground forces have been attacked. Trucks were already loading ammo from Tikhoretsk and that is 280 km from Donetsk. Loading from depots further away, or from smaller depots that are connected to the rail line, will take longer to move ammo to the front.
Not all the bunkers at these depots were destroyed and maybe not all of the bunkers were full. But some tens of thousands of tons of ammo went up in flames in just five days. Some estimates say 25% of the annual ammo production was destroyed. That’s enough ammo to cause a few thousand Ukrainian dead and wounded, to both military and civilian personnel.
It remains to be seen how often these attacks can be replicated with drones. The drones themselves are unlikely to have penetrated the bunkers. They were aided by the presence of ammo trains loaded with a couple thousand tons of ammo, and tons of ammo stored in the open. The massive secondary explosions were able to penetrate the bunkers. Still, if Ukraine can detect when trains arrive and when they will be loaded with ammo, the damage they could do would be tremendous. Since Russia doesn’t use pallets to transport equipment, it takes longer to load and unload trains and that will benefit Ukraine’s ability to target them.
None of these attacks will end the war by themselves, but they all contribute to the end. Russian ammo will continue to reach the front line, but, over time, the production will slow, the rate of movement will slow, and the intensity of attacks will decline. And Ukraine’s strategic bombing will continue to increase.
A military base near Pochep (52.86883598916418, 33.47398789265318) for the 856th Self-propelled Artillery Regiment, 144th Guards Motorized Rifle Division was hit by something faster than a prop drone. Since one of the soldiers called it a drone, it could be the Palyanytsia turbojet drone. The objective of the strike is unknown.
In December 2023, Putin increased the number of troops in the Russian army to 1.32 million. In December 2024, that will increase to 1.5 million.
Russia earned $1 billion from selling grain stolen from Ukraine. Some of that grain was shipped out of the port of Azov. Ukraine hit a grain terminal in that port back in May. Last week a Neptune missile set something in the Azov port on fire.
Over the last few years, the Russians have been testing an ICBM missile. Three of the four tests ended in failure. On the 21st, another missile exploded on launch.
***
(…to be continued…)
Russian ICBMs arent what they used (?) to be? I must say it is quite fun they are failing in that area.
This is why I love the US military. When we build a depot for ammo, it's built RIGHT. Buried at least partially, heavy concrete, proper blast doors, proper spacing. You will never seen so much as a case of hand grenades just lying around.