Posted by Ken Waldron on November 27, 2024, 12:51 pm
Interesting hypothesis. There have been lots of Ukainian apologists telling us that the Yuzhmash industrial plant is redundant: just some old Soviet scrapyard...I have an idea though that massive Soviet era bomb-proofed workshops are probably still as good as it gets.
As to the damage done by the "Oreshnik" well, the jury is out. The target runs so deep and the bombs (- or should I call them "kinetic penetrators"? ) designed likewise we won't get any genuine idea through satellite visuals.
Armchair Warlord @ArmchairW 10h Ukrainian Missile Crisis: Day 7⬇️
There were two significant developments in the last day that have shed new light on the ongoing escalation crisis between NATO and Russia. At this point it's clear Ukraine wasn't alone in their scheme - the UK and France were also key players.
1. The Russian Ministry of Defense made an unprecedented public disclosure of the targets, weapons, and outcomes of two Ukrainian ATACMS raids on November 23rd and 25th, including several photographs of missile debris at the targeted locations.
The actual net results were unspectacular - an air defense radar damaged and several Russian soldiers wounded, for 13 missiles expended - but it is interesting that the missiles used were very old base-model M39s, manufactured in the 1990s (see picture #2, with a vintage Lockheed Martin Vought Systems nameplate). These lacked the range to strike anything important in Crimea from Ukrainian territory, and rather than being new deliveries were likely from earlier tranches retained for tactical use after the Ukrainians ran out of newer M39A1 and M57 models firing them at Crimea.
2. Around the same time, the British Labour government disclosed that they had shipped as many as 150 Storm Shadow missiles to Ukraine in the last few weeks, replenishing the AFU's arsenal after they had run out (!) of these weapons. Given known stocks and the glacial production rate of these missiles, I wouldn't be particularly surprised if this represented Britain's entire remaining national stockpile.
This is a key piece of information that indicates that this missile escalation was in no small part planned by Britain and France, who - along with Ukraine - have been aggressively lobbying Washington for months now to order a strike campaign in "old" Russia. Ukraine wasn't so much "going rogue" as it was aggressively playing different factions of NATO off each other to get the policy outcome it wanted.
Now, the interesting thing here is that Ukraine has only actually launched one raid with Storm Shadow missiles, on November 20th - almost a week ago now. There's been nothing since despite the Ukrainians supposedly having a substantial stockpile of these missiles available and a whole "Christmas list" of targets in the Russian interior to strike. One would think they'd be getting busy.
This brings me to my theory for the evening.
Let us recall that in "retaliation" for the Ukrainian missile raids on November 19th and 20th, on the 21st a Russian "Oreshnik" IRBM plowed dozens of kinetic penetrator submunitions into the Yuzhmash industrial plant in Dnipropetrovsk at something like Mach 14. Muted secondary explosions could be seen on videos of the strike shortly after the impact. Yuzhmash is known to have a deep bunker complex underneath it dating from the Soviet Union, presumably to allow some level of industrial production to continue even following an all-out nuclear exchange.
Let us also recall that the Russians have located and destroyed Storm Shadow stockpiles in Ukraine on multiple previous occasions, despite what are presumably heroic operational security measures by the AFU. I'll just put it this way - the SVR and GRU are very, very good at their jobs. As such it would make a great deal of sense for the Ukrainians to store their long-range missile stockpile in a facility which, even if the Russians could sniff out the missiles there, they would have great difficulty targeting. A facility like, say, the doomsday bunker under Yuzhmash.
The British and French national leadership are full of war hawks that are, for whatever deranged reason, perfectly happy to play nuclear Russian roulette. I doubt that they would be sufficiently deterred by the Russians unveiling yet another weapon system that could reheat their nations over the course of a lunch break so as to order a U-turn on their scheme to dramatically escalate the war and "lock in" American policy before Trump takes office. The Russians know this very well of course.
What if last Friday's Oreshnik strike wasn't actually aimed at deterring anyone but was instead a disarming attack that destroyed the latest - and possibly last - shipment of Storm Shadow/SCALP-EG missiles in a hardened warehouse underneath Yuzhmash? This would explain both a lack of follow-up Storm Shadow attacks and new trial balloons floated in its aftermath by the same bad actors about transferring JASSM cruise missiles to Ukraine. I've even heard from a flight monitoring contact that covert transfers of Taurus missiles from Germany may be underway - something that would be totally unnecessary if the Ukrainians still had 100+ Storm Shadows on hand.
As I've said many times, the winning move for the Russians here is to continue to play the existing game rather than start a new one by widening the war. Under the rules of that game, anything in Ukraine can be targeted - and if these fancy British missiles cook off in their storage bunkers then there's really no need to deter anyone from using them.
This is, by the way, far more consistent with the normal logic of war than some kind of tit-for-tat retaliation scheme. You use everything you can, all the time, to inflict maximum damage upon the enemy so as to defeat them. That's well beyond mere deterrence.
on November 27, 2024, 12:51 pm