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Aug 16 • 21 tweets • 6 min read
1/ What's the significance of today's explosions in Russian-occupied Crimea, and could it potentially be even more significant than the HIMARS attack on a Russian ammunition train two weeks ago? A short 🧵.
2/ The explosion site is reportedly located in or near the village of Mais'ke, 21km east of the major road and rail junction of Dzhankoi. The Russians have already said it's an ammunition explosion (which is clear from the videos posted by various people).
3/ Depending on exactly where the seat of the explosion is, this could have a lot of strategic significance. The only direct railway line from Russia to Crimea runs through Mais'ke (the nearest passenger station is in the adjoining village of Azovske).
4/ It's therefore possible that this explosion has severed one of Russia's main routes into Crimea and southern Ukraine. It will be particularly difficult to fix if it's scattered unexploded ordnance over a wide area.
5/ Following the earlier HIMARS attack on a Russian ammunition train at Brylivka on the line from Dzhankoi to Kherson, I suggested that the Russians would likely seek to relocate their ammunition dumps and truck-train interchange points to places outside of HIMARS range.
6/ And as @igorsushko points out, Dzhankoi can't be reached by the GMLRS rockets that Ukraine is currently firing from its HIMARS. So the dump at Mais'ke may represent ammunition that the Russians were hoping was now out of the Ukrainians' reach.
7/ As @TrentTelenko and others have noted, this kind of distance greatly reduces the frequency with which Russia can resupply the front lines - Mais'ke is a 233 km, 4 hour drive from Kherson, for instance. So simply having to stay out of HIMARS range constrains the Russians.
8/ It's not impossible that the ammunition explosion in Mais'ke was an accident - Russia has expended vast amounts of ammunition and is now likely relying on older stocks, which tend to be less stable. Particularly with reliance on manual labour, accidents are quite possible.
9/ But there's also reportedly been an explosion at a transformer station in Dzhankoi. I've not yet seen it geolocated, but this may be related to the main Simferopol-Dzhankoi-Melitopol railway line, which is electrified (unlike the line through Mais'ke).
10/ It doesn't look like a coincidence that both have happened on the same morning. Could this represent a coordinated Ukrainian attack, perhaps using sabotage, to paralyse Russian rail transport in Crimea? /end
Addendum: it looks like this was an open-air dump a few hundred meters from the rail tracks. Azovske station was likely the offloading point. The M17/E97 road - one of the two trunk routes to Eastern Crimea - runs a little way to the north, making it an easy transshipment point.
Thanks to @KittyCatC_007 for the geolocation of the transformer fire - as they point out, it's is only 600m from the main line through Dzhankoi at 45°42'02.2"N 34°22'02.0"E. Not clear if that's linked to the railway but the odds are fairly high.
goo.gl/maps/7HYm7hAPQ…
It's been confirmed that the line through Mais'ke is damaged and out of use. This will be a massive blow to Russian logistics:
😬
The dump has basically been erased from the map:
Video posted by a Russian Telegram channel shows ammunition and equipment being stored rather crudely next to the tracks at Azovske station a month ago. (It's unclear at the moment if this exploded in addition to the depot at Mais'ke.)
The channel owner attributes the explosion to "a small [quad]copter with a grenade" - likely the same M.O. that was used to destroy the Russian air base at Saky 5 days ago - and complains bitterly about the dereliction of those responsible:
"You can sum up the results of six months of a successful special military operation as much as you like, but until there is a complete reformatting in the minds of the warriors...
(and those who arranged this are not military personnel, but despicable warriors), it’s too early to talk about real successes." t.me/rybar/37302

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More from @ChrisO_wiki

ChrisO Profile picture
Aug 17
1/ A 34-year-old former Russian paratrooper, Pavel Filatyev, has published a remarkable in-depth account of his experiences of the Ukraine war. He served with the Feodosia-based 56th Guards Air Assault Regiment and fought in southern Ukraine for two months. A 🧵 follows. Image
2/ Filatyev was part of the force that captured Kherson in February and was hospitalised with an eye injury after spending more than a month under heavy Ukrainian artillery bombardment near Mykolaiv. By that time, he was completely disillusioned with the war.
3/ While recuperating, Filatyev wrote a scathing 141-page memoir titled 'ZOV' (after the recognition symbols painted on vehicles of the invasion force) and published it on VKontakte (Russian Facebook). Not surprisingly, he's now been forced to flee Russia for his own safety.
Read 37 tweets
ChrisO Profile picture
Aug 13
1/ An interesting account has been published on Telegram of a disastrous Russian attempt to enter Kharkiv on 27 February, resulting numerous Russian casualties (h/t @RALee85). A column of the GRU's 2nd Spetsnaz Brigade was destroyed. Translation follows:
2/ "The dead have no shame".

Today Russia knows in detail about the "Gostomel" landing, the marines and the 9th regiment of the DNR army that took Mariupol.

Unfortunately, many more pages of deeds of the Russian guys are still hidden from us.
3/ Few people know about the feat of the [special forces] operatives from Pskov, who were surrounded for more than ten hours in an unequal battle in the centre of Kharkov and did not wait for reinforcements.
Read 30 tweets
ChrisO Profile picture
Aug 12
Following my recent threads on the experiences of Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine, as described in intercepted calls and personal accounts (see the link below), here's a final 🧵 to address some of the questions that have been raised by people.
First, I need to thank @wartranslated and the WarTranslated project. They've done a fantastic job of translating material from various sources, and I couldn't have written my threads without that. Please follow them here and on their website. wartranslated.com
Q1: How do you know the calls are genuine?

From my own perspective, there's no sign that they're fake – they're internally consistent and also consistent with other publicly available information. And to quote @wartranslated:
Read 23 tweets
ChrisO Profile picture
Aug 10
1/ This is a continuation of my earlier thread linked below, concerning a leaked archive of complaints made to the Russian military prosecutor's office concerning Russian soldiers' involvement in the Ukraine war.
2/ Soldiers sent to Ukraine found themselves facing severe pressure when they refused to continue participating in the war (see also my thread on this topic, linked below.)
3/ One soldier, the commander of a rifle squad in the 15th Guards Motorized Rifle Regiment, wrote:
Read 38 tweets
ChrisO Profile picture
Aug 10
1/ @the_ins_ru has obtained an archive of complaints made to the Russian military prosecutor's office, which provides some very interesting insights from various perspectives into the experiences of Russian soldiers in the Ukraine war. Here's a 🧵 highlighting some of them.
2/ The girlfriend of a Russian paratrooper, Anatoly Nikolaevich Taimanov, wrote that he had been reported killed in Hostomel near Kyiv on 9 March. He was supposedly burned to death. She and his parents were given a body to bury on 15 April. However, she doubted it was him.
3/ She saw her boyfriend listed as a Ukrainian captive and wanted to verify it. However, Anatoly's parents did not want to help as "they are unwilling to ... try to find their son among the prisoners or the seriously wounded. They are satisfied with monetary compensation."
Read 38 tweets
ChrisO Profile picture
Aug 9
1/ Russia's Saki Naval Air Station at Novofedorivka in occupied Crimea has today "gone on fire", as they say in Scotland. Everyone and his dog appears to be speculating on how it was done, so for a change I'm going to look for clues about what it wasn't.
2/ It apparently wasn't a Western system. A Ukrainian source has told the New York Times that "a device exclusively of Ukrainian manufacture was used". So that rules out HIMARS (which is out of range anyway) and other Western long-range missiles. nytimes.com/live/2022/08/0…
3/ It wasn't a cruise missile. None of the videos show cruise missiles passing overhead, and there've been no reports of cruise missiles. So that rules out Ukraine's R-360 Neptun missile of Moskva sinking fame (which flies at a very low altitude and has a fairly small warhead).
Read 9 tweets

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