One way to address the betrayal of the Trump administration in denying war materiel to the Ukrainians is to deny war materiel to the Russian aggressor.  Yesterday afternoon a series of powerful explosions rocked the Kirzhatsky district of the Volodymyr region of Russia.  The regional Ministry of Emergency Situations issued an emergency warning asking local residents to avoid the village of Barsovo, which really means the 51st Arsenal of the DRAU of the Main Missile and Artillery Directorate of the Ministry of Defense.

Located east of Moscow and 530 km from the border with Ukraine, this site is covered by the most concentrated air defense system in the whole of Russia.  It has an approximate area is 3.5 sq km.  Its design capacity is 264,000 tons of various ammunition.  In total there are forty-five separate covered facilities and thirty external storage points.  In the aftermath of the Ukrainian strike the explosions are continuing today.  Russia kept significant reserves of artillery shells at the site, plus missiles of various types including “Iskander”, “Point-U”, “Dagger”, ammunition for the Pansir-S1, S-300, and S-400, as well as “Grad”, “Smerch”, “Hurricane” rockets.  Ukraine’s UNIAN information agency reported the comments of Pavlo Narozhny, a Ukrainian military expert:

It is difficult to estimate the exact scale of losses as a result of the explosion at the Russian arsenal in the Kirzhatsky district of the Volodymyr region, because Russia hides such information. 

“You can give a rough estimate. 200,000 tons of ammunition was in this arsenal. If we imagine that these were exclusively artillery ammunition, then each projectile weighs about 100 kg, that is, it is 2 million artillery shells. Of course, there were not only artillery shells, but also rockets, rockets, etc. 2 million shells is approximately the annual production of shells of the Russian Federation and the DPRK combined”, Narozhny said.

He noted that this is a significant blow to the military capabilities of the Russians, which is almost impossible to quickly restore. The expert also called the possibility of extinguishing the fire at the arsenal “unreal”.

“Yes, they have special machines for simmering such fires. But in reality it does not work. In reality, it is impossible to stop it. There were shells for MLRS, rockets. Such a missile catches fire from fire, an uncontrolled launch occurs, and it can fly anywhere - both 100 meters and 10 kilometers. And other missiles, decomposed in clean air, begin to explode from it… We can say that 90 percent of this arsenal has been lost”, Narozhny added.

As a result of the on-going degradation in the number of Russian artillery pieces as well as similar strikes last September on very large-scale Russian ammunition storage facilities, the artillery offset in favour of Russia, which has generally been 10:1, reduced to an average of 3:1, even reaching parity in certain key areas.  It is only that “good” for the Russians because of the two million (variable quality) shells delivered from store by North Korea.  This latest strike will have a like impact, and will hopefully much reduce the use of ballistic missiles against civilian targets.