Ukraine Destroys Months of Russian Ammo Supplies in Large Drone Strike
Analyzing the Toropets Explosion
Last Wednesday started like any other day – I checked my email, read some press releases, scanned the Early Bird, and opened the secure messaging app Signal to see if any sources reached out.
Within minutes of opening Signal, I saw a note from an Air Force colleague who went on to work at DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency.
“Wes, check out this video.”
With no other context, the next message was a six-second video of a massive explosion shot from a mobile device.
Dear God, I thought – looks like a low-yield nuclear explosion.
“Where is this at?” I responded.
“Toropets, Tver Oblast. Russia’s largest arms depot.”
For the next two hours, we socialized the video with members from our former team, comparing the footage to the GBU-43/B explosion, also called the MOAB for ‘Mother of All Bombs’, as well as small nuclear explosions we’ve seen from Cold War tests.
The Toropets blast was so large, it was picked up by NASA satellites and earthquake monitors.
According to Estonian Defense Forces Intelligence Center Head Colonel Ants Kiviselg, the strike caused 30,000 tons of munitions to explode, noting that the size of the explosion equates to 750,000 artillery shells.
The explosion certainly looks like what you would expect 750,000 artillery shells to look like if they all went up at once.
Assuming the Russian average consumption rate of 10,000 shells per day, this would wipe out about two and a half months of ammunition for Russia.
But the ammo depot stored more than just artillery shells.
According to a source in the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), the arsenal also stored ballistic missiles, including Iskanders, anti-aircraft missiles, and KAB-guided bombs.
But Euronews has a more comprehensive list of what’s stored at the site from its sources, including fuel tanks, numerous missiles and explosive warehouses, S300 missiles, Tochka-U tactical missile systems, and North Korean KN-23 missiles.
Russia built the Toropets depot in 2015 and was part of a 2012 Russian government program to improve its explosive storage protocols.
The program, worth 90 billion rubles (nearly $980 million), called for 13 modern arms depots to be built.
In 2018, Russian Deputy Defense Minister Dmitry Bulgakov said, "The arsenal ensures safe and secure storage, protects (weapons) from aerial and missile strikes and even from the damage of a nuclear explosion."
We now know that the site is not, in fact, safe from a nuclear explosion, as claimed. It couldn’t withstand a Ukrainian drone strike.
If we look at the pre-explosion site from satellite, we can see that the Russian defense ministry appears to have taken the necessary precautions – the storage buildings are concrete buildings, covered in earthen berms, with dirt berms blocking the entrance from the front (so that explosive debris won’t have a clear flight right through the front door.)
What’s more, notice the area has been cleared of vegetation and is mostly sand. This is to prohibit the spread of fire between buildings.
The closest distance between buildings is 160 feet, which seems a little close to me – depending on the weapon type stored inside. The blast from a single Iskander warhead can be as large as 25,000 square meters according to Russian sources.
If we look at an older part of the base only a half-kilometer away, we can see that many ammo storage buildings are not as well-protected: They are above ground, not protected by dirt or earthen berms, and are surrounded by trees.
Now, we know that Ukraine attacked Toropets with a large number of explosive, long-range drones – perhaps as many as 300.
After the attack, Tver Gov. Igor Rudenya told reporters that all drones in the region were shot down and that there was a fire on the ground as a result of debris from a downed drone.
As he was speaking, loud explosions could be heard in the background.
It reminds me of that scene from Naked Gun where Leslie Nielsen as Detective Frank Drebin stands in front of an exploding fireworks factory and says “Nothing to see here. Please disperse.”
Okay, let’s assume that there were no direct hits with Ukrainian drones, but debris started a fire that set off the munitions.
I checked the weather in September for Toropets, Tver Oblast, and found something interesting. Toropets had an incredibly dry September. In fact, according to Russia’s weather service, there has been a forest fire watch for much of the oblast.
So, the area may have been primed to burst into flames, like dry kindling, with a little help from Ukraine’s drones.
The rest is likely mismanagement.
Remember Deputy Defense Minister Dmitry Bulgakov – the one who said the ammo depot could withstand a nuclear explosion?
He was arrested in July 2024 following corruption allegations – so it is extremely plausible, likely even, that safety measures at the base were lackluster.
With ammo storage, the Department of the Army Pamphlet 385-64, Ammunition and Explosives Safety Standards, gives us some best practices when it comes to preventing events like this.
Among them are separation distances between storage locations, ideal storage conditions like providing appropriate dunnage, and keeping explosives in sealed containers in a cool place with adequate ventilation.
The Army also recommends storing ammunition in storage compatibility groups – to minimize the risk of a small explosion turning into a large explosion.
If the same guy who said renovations at the site met the "highest international standards" later gets arrested for funneling money to his private dacha, how much maintenance was actually performed?
As of this writing, it is still difficult to get an open-source view of the site due to the thick smoke still covering the blast zone. So, a full damage assessment is impossible.
But NATO has satellites like the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) and the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), as well as birds with Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) that can see right through the smoke and get an accurate assessment.
I assume this is the intelligence that Estonian Defense Forces Intelligence Center Head Colonel Ants Kiviselg was referring to when he made his claim of 30,000 tons of munitions.
It’s also worth mentioning the distinction between 30,000 tons of explosives and 30,000 tons of munitions. The 30-kiloton number related to the ammo dump is the combined weight of the shells and missiles, not the equivalent of their explosive power in TNT.
Still, the video of the explosion looks almost like a small-yield 30-kiloton nuclear bomb – as if everything exploded almost at the same time. After watching the video hundreds of times at this point, there are not a lot of secondary explosions. So, it might as well have been a nuke – minus the radiation.
I guess the big headline here is Russia’s loss of several months’ worth of frontline ammunition – including, presumably, some North Korean munitions that were being stored at the site.
This may help alleviate some pressure on the frontlines in Ukraine for a while.
Until then, Ukraine should continue its strikes against the aggressors to diminish Russia’s war-making capacity.
Think about it like this:
If we imagine a large barrel representing Russia’s long-term capacity for making war. All of Russia’s natural resources, political leadership, military factories, ammo depots, manpower, et cetera… everything gets dumped into this barrel.
Their war-making capacity barrel has a conveyor belt attached to it. This conveyor belt represents Russia’s near-term ability to convert capacity into frontline power.
But this conveyor belt is barely functioning because of corruption, supply chain woes, low morale, officers with no experience, poor vehicle maintenance, and more.
On the other end of this conveyor belt is a much smaller barrel that represents Russia’s actual frontline combat power.
Ukraine can win this war by hitting the large barrel until Russia’s long-term capacity is so reduced that it cannot sustain frontline combat power.
It makes me happy that this is exactly what Ukraine is targeting with its long-range strikes and incursion into Kursk. It shows that Kyiv has a deep understanding of the mechanics at play and what they need to achieve victory.
Stay alert. Stay alive.
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Your closing comment mirrrors Phillips O’Brien’s central point on how the Allies beat Germany in WWII: destroying the enemy’s instruments of war before they reach the frontline has a much greater effect than destroying them in battle.
How can a huge ammo dump that has munitions stored in dozens of separate buildings simultaneously blow up without many secondary explosives? One would think that the buildings would explode one at a time with at least a small delay between explosions.
It does not seem possible unless there was one huge detonation that then blew up all the other buildings.