Tuesday, June 20, 2023

Destruction in Rykove

Crazy before and after satellite photographs of the June 18 missile attack on a major Russian arms depot in Rykove, in Kherson Oblast just northeast of Crimea. A whole warehouse complex simply vanished, along with a stretch of railroad tracks. That's the main railroad connecting Russia to Crimea so its loss, even for a few weeks, is a pretty big deal.

 
Rykove is here.

Below, photographs of the explosion and the remains of the complex.


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1 comment:

G. Verloren said...

Can't speak with much authority of course, but from some back of the envelope calculations and some poking around for reference, I'm reasonably confident this had the power of something like 40 to 50 tons of TNT.

Where I'm less confident is in just how big of a depot that would imply - not all explosives have the same power, and raw tonnage numbers for ammo depots apparently vary wildly. Sites with hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of pounds of explosives are fairly common - but seemingly those are major regional depots meant for long term storage during peacetime.

Sites near active front lines, like many that have been destroyed by Ukraine in the war, seem to average far smaller - a common number I've found is 5 tons or so, which is still quite considerable. This appears to have been about an order of magnitude larger, which seems to fit with the description of this as a "major" arms depot, situated further back from the lines. But I'm still not really sure how to gauge the scale of it all. Substantial, though, clearly.

June 21, 2023 at 7:06 AM

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