1/ Ukraine's recent HIMARS attack on a Russian ammunition train seems to have been an unusually high-casualty event – reportedly 80 Russians killed and another 200 wounded. I hadn't really thought about this until @TrentTelenko made an important point.
2/ In a useful thread he posted yesterday, Trent pointed out the vulnerability of Russia's non-palletised approach to logistics and its dependency on manual labour, which makes loading and unloading far slower than in Western militaries.
3/ @noclador covers the issue from another angle in a separate thread in which, inter alia, he discusses how Russian logistics have worked on the Donbas front:
4/ Usefully, he also includes a video of an unloading event. At least 36 men can be seen – indicative of how manpower-intensive it is.
5/ This suggests a different scenario from the one I had originally put forward in my 1 August thread in which I noted that the train was hit on a passing loop on a single-track line. I had assumed the train was waiting for a signal to proceed.
6/ However, an alternative possibility is suggested by the high number of casualties: the Ukrainians may have caught the Russians in the middle of an unloading event. Rather than being en route to somewhere, Brylivka may actually have been the train's destination.
7/ The village is near the junction of two significant roads: the E97 to Kherson (63 km away) and the T2210 to Nova Kakhovka (48 km away), both of which are vital positions for the Russians. Brylivka would have been a sensible place to transfer the supplies to trucks.
8/ So if this hypothesis is correct, the very large reported number of Russian casualties likely represents troops being caught in the explosions as they were unloading the train/loading trucks.
9/ Unfortunately the only satellite image I've seen is too low resolution to show any trucks - have any higher-resolution images been published yet?
10/ The Russians' most likely (and in fact only viable) response to this will be to move their truck-train transport points further down the line, out of HIMARS range, which will further reduce their capacity to transport ammunition to where it's needed. /end
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