Ukraine hits two more Russian munition depots, seeking to disrupt war effort

KYIV, Ukraine – Ukraine said Saturday that it had struck two large ammunition depots deep inside Russia overnight. It was the second such attack in less than a week as Kyiv seeks to escalate hits on Russian military bases and warehouses to try to disrupt Moscow’s military logistics and slow its troops’ advance on the battlefield.

The strikes announced Saturday targeted ammunition depots near the towns of Toropets, in northwestern Russia, and Tikhoretsk, in the country’s southwest. The facilities are both more than 200 miles from Ukrainian-controlled territory, and one has been identified as a major storage facility for munitions that Russia has acquired from North Korea.

Ukraine said its armed forces had struck the depot near Toropets with drones, but it stopped short of specifying the types of weapons used in the attack on Tikhoretsk, saying only that the arsenals had been “hit by fire,” raising the possibility that it had used a new kind of weapon.

The attack came as Ukraine has been pressing its allies for weeks to let it use powerful, Western-delivered missiles to strike targets deep inside Russia. That authorization has yet to be granted, according to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and in the meantime his country has sought to modify missiles and drones already in its arsenal for long-range use.

Russia has not directly acknowledged the strikes on the depots, but regional authorities said that a drone attack on Tikhoretsk had “caused a fire that spread to explosive objects” and triggered detonations. Some 1,200 residents were evacuated from the area. Russian state news agency Tass reported that a drone attack near Toropets had forced the evacuation of a train station and the suspension of traffic on a highway.

NASA satellites detected multiple fires at the two depots Saturday. The attack came four days after another ammunition depot near Toropets was hit by Ukrainian drones, causing a huge explosion, with videos showing large fireballs lighting up the night sky.

Strikes on weapons arsenals are crucial for Ukraine to weaken Russia’s overwhelming fire superiority on the battlefield, military experts have said. Every week, Russia bombards Ukrainian front-line positions and cities with missiles, guided bombs and artillery shells. Ukrainian soldiers have long been outgunned at the front, with Zelenskyy saying in April that Russia fires 10 shells for every Ukrainian one.

Serhii Kuzan, chair of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center, a nongovernmental research group, said, “The only way to defeat the Russian army is to defeat its logistics,” most specifically by destroying its ammunition depots.

“This is the destruction of the most key component of warfare,” he added. “Tanks and guns without ammunition will not fire and will simply be ineffective.”

The earlier attack on an ammunition depot this past week took place Wednesday, just outside Toropets, and appears to have caused serious damage. NASA satellites continued to detect fires at that depot Saturday, and satellite imagery released by the British Defense Ministry showed destroyed storage bunkers and 280-foot-wide craters.

The British ministry said that the depot “almost certainly housed munitions of varying calibers for front-line use, as well as missiles and glide bombs used by nearby airfields.”

Col. Ants Kiviselg, head of Estonia’s military intelligence center, told journalists Friday that “30,000 tons of explosive ordnance were detonated” in the attack, the equivalent of about 750,000 shells.

“That’s two to three months’ supply of ammunition” for Russian forces in Ukraine, he noted. “As a result of this attack, Russia has suffered losses in ammunition, and we will see the impact of these losses on the front in the coming weeks.”

His assessment could not be immediately confirmed.

It is unclear whether Saturday’s attacks had a similar impact. But one of the two depots that was targeted, the one near Tikhoretsk, has been used as a storage site for North Korean munitions shipped to Russia, as documented by several think tanks and confirmed by the White House last fall.

Since late 2022, Russia has turned to buying shells and missiles from North Korea, which has a vast supply of Soviet-era weaponry, U.S. officials and independent analysts have said.

Many of those weapons arrived at the Tikhoretsk depot, whose storage capacity has recently been increased, according to reports by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies and the London-based Royal United Services Institute.

Imagery from late September 2023 “shows trains arriving at the facility, delivering dozens of containers of the same size and colors as those being loaded in North Korea,” the institute’s report said.

The Ukrainian army said that 2,000 tons of ammunition, including some from North Korea, had been delivered to the depot shortly before Saturday’s strike. The claim could not be independently verified. Ukrainian officials have said that the injection of North Korean weapons into the battlefield, particularly artillery shells, has helped Russian forces maintain an edge.

“Of all Russia’s allies, our biggest problem is North Korea,” Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, said at a security conference last week in Kyiv. “Because with the volume of military products that they supply, they actually affect the intensity of the fighting.”

Analysts say that the Tikhoretsk depot has also been an important nexus in supplying Russian forces. It is roughly equidistant from the combat zone in southeastern Ukraine and from Crimea, the Russian-occupied peninsula that has been an important logistics hub for funneling ammunition to the rest of the southern front.

The full array of weapons Ukraine used to attack the depots is unclear.

Justin Bronk, a senior research fellow for air power and technology at the Royal United Services Institute, said it was “entirely possible to set off ammunition stored in the open, even with relatively small warheads” carried by attack drones “if they hit the right place.”

But Kuzan said that the ammunition depots were often protected with earth berms and underground concrete shelters that made them difficult to attack with drones.

“To do this you need not just a missile, it must be a heavy missile,” he said, pointing to long-range weapons supplied to Ukraine by Western allies, such as British-French Storm Shadow missiles.

But Ukraine has so far been barred by its allies from using those weapons inside Russia. Zelenskyy told journalists Friday that the White House was afraid that such an authorization would escalate the war. He said he would use a trip to the United States next week to try to persuade President Joe Biden to lift the ban.

To circumvent it for now, at least partially, Ukraine has begun developing its own weapons, such as anti-ship missiles modified for land attacks, which it says it has already used to target Russia’s oil infrastructure. Ukraine also says it has developed long-range rocket drones that carry large warheads and can strike targets hundreds of miles away.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.