New Ukrainian weapons hit Russia where it hurts

Hello, everybody. It is Peter Zion coming to you from a foggy Colorado it is the 22nd of September. In the news in the last four or five days is that the Ukrainians have managed to blowns up a handful of major armed depots within Russian territory, some of them a couple 100 miles from the border. The three places in question are Krasnodar, tow rope pets and tikhourettes. Yeah, pretty sure that’s right. Anyway, one of these was big enough that it was detected by seismic monitoring stations 1000 miles away, which is kind of creepy, kiloton range explosion. We got four things going on here, all of which are pretty significant, that when you put them together, it does suggest a change in the temple of the war. The first thing is, it is important to understand that the Russians don’t move and store ammo like normal people. They don’t use forklifts, they don’t use crates, they don’t use pallets. They just have things in boxes. They’re moved by hand. And so when something does go wrong, and things often go wrong. Things are very blamy, and that is definitely what has happened at all three of these facilities. The second thing that has happened is the Ukrainians have brought a new weapon system into play. It’s kind of a The technical term is drone missile. It’s like a little bit shy of a cruise missile. The name of the thing is polenta. And I’m not going to apologize for mispronouncing that one, because the Ukrainians chose that name specifically because it was difficult for the Russians to I’m in the clear the plaza. Anyway, its range isn’t nearly as good as a lot of the drones that the Ukrainians have been fielding over the course of the summer. You know, some of these things have hit 1000 miles from the front. These probably have a range of no more than 300 however, because it’s a missile instead of a drone, it flies much faster, is much harder to intercept, and can carry a much heavier payload. The bigger of Ukraine’s drones to this point, can only have a warhead, about 75 pounds. Most of them like a third of that. But these things are probably having warheads that are two to five times as large. I say probably because it’s new, and just last week was the first time we saw them in play that said we’re seeing them in play in large numbers, specifically the attack on toprats use, apparently, at least 100 of these things. So, you know, not, not something that is just one or two a shot. Their whole fleets of things are now already being launched, and for their debut, that’s pretty impressive from a manufacturing point of view, leaving aside everything that has to do with logistics and military planning. The third issue is that Russia, when it does move cargo more than the final mile, it’s usually by rail. Russian territory is wide open, lots of distance to cover, and the value add of the agricultural land in Russia is very, very low. Precipitation is fickle. The summer season is short. So the amount of income that the Russian land can generate for the state per square mile is very, very low. Of the major agricultural zones in the world, by far the world’s lowest. That means that the Russians can’t afford what we would consider to be a normal method of transporter, like having a road network so individual farmers can always access the transport system. The Russians just don’t have the income that’s necessary to build, much less maintain that sort of network. They need something that’s much more cost effective. And so everything that gets moved in Russia, well, 90% of it tends to move by rail, and whether that is a barrel of monkeys or a bushel of grain or a stack of ammo canisters. It means it all goes by rail, and it’s only in the front, final mile that it’s usually moved by hand, and then some maybe by civilian car to get to the front if it’s a military asset. Anyway, lots of vulnerability in that sort of system. But since you don’t necessarily know where the trains are going to be, it can be a little hard to target, because rail networks are really hard to disrupt in the long term, you just have to lay new rail if it gets blown up. Well, in the tikkaretsk attack, it appears that a train was there at the time of the attack unloading ammo, and the train itself was hit, and so the entire depot was blown up. Now I must emphasize here, I’m using local reporting from within Russia, so I don’t know how much to trust it, but usually the Russians don’t celebrate their own trains getting blown up and their own ammo dumps getting blown up. Uh, celebrate wrong words anyway. Point being that, unless this was just an amazing coincidence, it suggests that the Ukrainians have found a way to track in real time Russian rail movements. And there’s reason to think that that is real, because if you remember, a few weeks ago, the Ukrainians attacked Russia to the north of them and took over large portions of the Kursk province, complete with the radio depot at a place called sudza. And if that Suds is allowing the Ukrainians to basically tap into or hack into the Russian rail network, they now know the schedules and the locations of the rail locomotives and what they might be carrying, and if what they might be carrying is explosive, and it’s going to a place where it’s unloading into a warehouse, it’s full of things that are explosive. Well, let’s just call that a target rich environment for the Ukrainians. So we should expect to see more of the. Sort of activity. Which brings us to the fourth and final issue, which is probably a change in targeting. If the Ukrainians really do have better intel on the rail system now, and if they’ve got these faster, more lethal mass produced missile drones, well, the logical target for the Ukrainians is to start going after the power generation and distribution system, unlike in the United States, where we move half of our cargo by ton mile by truck. In Russia, you know, rail is really important, and two thirds of Russia’s locomotives are electric. So if you can disrupt the electricity system, then the entire Russian transport system falls apart. Now we may already be seeing some of the early stages of this. We know the Ukrainians have used some drones to attack some power centers in Crimea. It felt like a test run to me. There weren’t a lot involved. But if they really do have better information on rail systems, and now they’ve got the weapon systems to go after ammo, and they’ve got the weapon systems to go after the transport network, we’re probably going to see a lot more activity within 150 miles of the border, to the north, to the northeast and to the east of Ukraine proper. And we have seen Russian counteroffensives in places like curse peter out in the last 72 hours, as well as seen the Russian assaults on places like the Donbas in eastern Ukraine, where they were on the verge of capturing a Ukrainian rail network at borovsk. It’s a place that the Russians have been assaulting and moving towards for months, ever since they captured the fortress city of avodivka in the Donbas back in the spring. Anyway, they got within about five, six miles of it. They were making early study progress. If they had taken that out, they would have basically hobbled Ukraine’s ability to move forces back and forth along the front to wherever they were needed to be. And the assault just stopped in the last few days, probably because of attacks that are having just this sort of effect. So this is really bad for the Russians, short, mid and long term. It hits to the ability of them to get to the front in the first place, much less supply it. Remember that the Russians never have operated on a quality basis with their military. It’s all about throwing huge numbers of people and lots and lots of shells at whatever their target is, and incrementally advancing. You can’t do that without a very robust rail network, and the Ukrainians may well have just found a way to go after the heart of it.