Ukraine is eroding Russia's military advantage with strikes on its ammo depots
Satellite image ©2024 Maxar Technologies.
- Ukrainian officials said its forces have reduced Russia's artillery advantage on the battlefield.
- Military experts said it's partly down to Ukraine's long-range strikes on Russian ammo depots.
- Ukraine struck three ammunition depots inside Russia last month, causing significant damage.
Ukraine is reducing Russia's artillery advantage on the battlefield, and recent attacks on ammo depots have likely sped that up.
Ukraine's deputy defense minister, Ivan Havryliuk, told Ukrainian television last week that Russian forces were now firing three times as many shells as Ukraine as of early October, down from eight times as many last winter, per the defense ministry-run Army Inform outlet.
This came less than a month after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told CNN that Russia's artillery advantage around Pokrovsk, a town in eastern Ukraine, had dropped from 12-to-1 to 2.5-to-1 after the start of Ukraine's surprise incursion into Kursk in August.
According to military experts, these developments are likely due in part to Ukraine's recent long-range strikes on Russian ammunition depots.
"The recent strikes likely destroyed a significant amount of munitions and may have also damaged logistics systems used to support force groupings," said John Hardie, deputy director of the Russia Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
The targeted sites stored glide bombs, ballistic missiles, and artillery shells. However, Hardie said it is impossible to say with certainty how much or even exactly what was destroyed in those attacks, making it difficult to definitively say how much ammunition was lost.
Taking out the ammo
Ukraine damaged several rear Russian ammo depots using long-range weapons in a string of long-range strikes that began last month.
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One took place overnight on September 17 and targeted a facility in Toropets in Russia's western Tver region with long-range drones.
A source in the Security Service of Ukraine told BI at the time that a large warehouse in Toropets where Russian munitions and ballistic missiles, including Iskanders, were stored was "literally wiped off the face of the earth" in the attack.
A few days later, on September 21, the Ukrainian military said it hit another arsenal in the Tver region — this one at Oktyabrsky.
It also said it targeted a depot near Tikhoretsk, a town in the southern Krasnodar Krai region, describing the site as one of Russia's largest ammunition storage facilities.
Meanwhile, on Thursday, Ukraine said it struck a military airfield and an ammunition warehouse in the southwestern Republic of Adygea, causing "fire damage" to the airfield, a base for Su-34 and Su-27 warplanes.
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While the damage has been "very significant," Emil Kastehelmi, a Finnish military analyst with the Black Bird Group analysis firm, said it is hard to assess the impact of the depot attacks because we don't "precisely" know which munitions and how many blew up.
The number of sites destroyed can be counted, he said, but it's "almost impossible" to say how many munitions were stored in each.
Hardie said that if Ukraine's claims about the Toropets warehouse containing Iskander ballistic missiles are true, and that a large number were destroyed, then it would diminish Russia's near-term capacity to strike high-value targets like critical infrastructure and air defense systems.
The Iskander is a ballistic missile that can strike targets within 300 miles with a roughly 1,000-pound warhead, with estimates that Russia can produce 30 of these a month.
Satellite image ©2024 Maxar Technologies.
Looking at the Tikhoretsk ammunition storage facility, he said the impact would depend on exactly how much ammunition was there at the time. The impact was probably "temporary," he said, but it could have diminished Russia's capabilities for a period of "days or weeks."
Striking deep inside Russia in the long run
To carry out these long-range strikes inside Russia, Ukraine has had to rely heavily on the limited supplies of long-range drones and missiles it produces, as it has been barred from using its arsenal of Western-provided long-range missiles like ATACMS to go after targets in Russia.
Last month, Zelenskyy told CNN lifting those restrictions was a "key" part of the victory plan, and last week he said the country had successfully tested its long-range "Palianytsia" jet-powered drone.
According to Hardie, Ukraine could "seriously" undercut Russia's offensive potential if it can replicate last month's strikes "consistently."
He said the threat of such strikes could lead Russia to disperse its weapons depots and staging points, making its logistics far less efficient.
But he said Ukraine's capacity to do so relies on its production rate of long-range one-way attack drones.
"Many, probably most, of the drones fired in a salvo get shot down, so you have to launch a lot of them," he added.
"Destroying these areas would bring greater success to Ukraine," said Mark Temnycky, a nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center, referring to military and paramilitary targets on Russian soil, "as the areas that are directly supplying Russian soldiers would be destroyed."
Satellite image ©2024 Maxar Technologies.
But Kastehelmi said that in the long run, Russia will "most likely" be able to adapt to Ukraine's long-range strikes.
"The Russians will, of course, react and adapt — if they're able to switch to a safer way of storing ammo, for example, by decentralizing their system, creating a heavy impact will be more difficult," he said.
And if Ukraine wants to continue these strikes, it will have to produce long-range drones or missiles "relatively efficiently" and "with decent costs," he said.
Even then, Russia may be able to ramp up its air-defense capabilities near such sites in a way that could put a dent in Ukraine's long-range attacks.
"I doubt the Ukrainians are able to produce so many long-range missiles or drones that it could turn the tide of the war," Kastehelmi added.
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