Ukraine has Russia’s all-important ammunition depots firmly in its sights, but Kyiv’s successes in hitting valuable munitions bases across the border are limited by its Western allies’ refusal to green-light long-range-strike weapons.
Since late summer, Ukraine has intensified its targeting of ammunition depots, which are vital for keeping Russia’s guns and artillery systems firing, inside Russia and in Moscow-held Ukrainian territory.
In July, a law enforcement source told Ukrainian online newspaper The Kyiv Independent that drones had stuck a large ammunition depot in the village of Sergeevka, in Russia’s Voronezh region.
Voronezh’s regional governor, Alexander Gusev, said at the time that air defenses had destroyed incoming Ukrainian drones, but “when their remains fell, a fire broke out at one of the warehouses.”
“Explosive objects began to detonate,” Gusev said.
Ukraine has intensified its targeting of ammunition depots inside Russia and in Moscow-held Ukrainian territory since late summer.
Photo Illustration by Newsweek/Getty Images
The Russian governor issued a similar statement in late August, saying drone debris had sparked a blaze, which then set off “explosive objects” around the town of Ostrogozhsk.
Ukraine’s GUR military intelligence agency, which is often behind long-range attacks in Russia, said that its operatives “blew up a large warehouse of ammunition” in the Voronezh town. The depot had stored more than 5,000 tons of ammunition, including Russian artillery and tank rounds, as well as surface-to-air missiles, the GUR said.
In early September, Ukraine attacked an ammunition depot near the Voronezh village of Soldatskoye. The strike destroyed munitions supplied by North Korea, Andriy Kovalenko, an official with Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, said at the time.
In little over a week in mid-September, Ukraine said its navy had targeted a Russian ammunition depot in the southern port city of Mariupol, followed by several other reported hits on munitions storage sites.
Ukraine then said on September 21 that it had hit a munitions depot near Tikhoretsk, a town in Russia’s southwestern Krasnodar region. The Tikhoretsk site was “one of the three largest ammunition storage bases” for Russia and crucial for Moscow’s logistics supporting its war effort, the Ukrainian military said. Kyiv estimated that around 2,000 tons of ammunition, including munitions provided by North Korea, were stored at the site.
The General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces said at the time that its SBU security service had separately attacked a Russian Defense Ministry ammunition depot close to Oktyabrsky, a village in the Tver region. “Fire and detonation are recorded in the areas of both military arsenals,” the General Staff said.
Just days earlier, Ukraine targeted another ammunition depot in the Tver region, close to the town of Toropets. The resulting explosion at the site was “equivalent to a mild earthquake,” the British Defense Ministry said shortly afterward.
Earlier this week, Ukraine homed in on an ammunition depot in Russia’s border Bryansk region, attacking what Kovalenko described as a storage facility for North Korean supplies in the town of Karachev, just over 70 miles from the Ukrainian border.
In a brief statement published on Thursday, Ukraine’s General Staff said it had hit an ammunition warehouse at an airfield in Russia’s southern Adygeya Republic region. The previous day, it said it had struck a depot in the Krasnodar region that was housing Iranian-designed Shahed kamikaze drones that have long terrorized Ukrainian cities.
Several of these sites—the Tikhoretsk, Toropets and Karachev depots—have belonged to the GRAU, or Russia’s Main Missile and Artillery Directorate.
Ukrainian defense outlet Defense Express had identified the Karachev depot as a likely target for Kyiv in mid-September, describing the facility as one of six GRAU depots within the 750-kilometer range often attributed to Kyiv’s new missile drone, known as Palianytsia. It is not clear whether this new, domestically developed weapon is responsible for any of the attacks.
For an outgunned Ukraine, targeting these facilities has obvious benefits. Ammunition is essential for both sides in what has become a war of attrition lasting more than two and a half years, with no real end in sight.
Moscow’s ammunition supplies have been greater than the stocks at Kyiv’s disposal, but it has still burned through its arsenal as the war has ground on. But Russia has received significant munitions deliveries from North Korea, which Ukraine has said it can see arriving in the war-torn country, and they are quickly felt on the battlefield.
Munitions supplied by North Korea are “really bad for us, and so far there’s nothing we can do about that,” Kyrylo Budanov, the head of the GUR, said during an appearance in Kyiv in September.
“The worst problem we are facing is the one coming from North Korea,” Budanov said.
It is “important for Ukraine to strike military facilities on the territory of Russia,” Ukrainian politician and parliament member Oleksiy Goncharenko told Newsweek.
But Kyiv is still frustrated, waiting on approval from its allies to use long-range Western weapons to hit deep inside Russia. Despite signals from the U.S. last month, the restrictions that would allow Ukraine to hit high-value military targets well over the border remain in place.
“We are waiting for our partners to allow us to hit Russian military facilities with the weapons they will supply us,” Goncharenko said.
Sanctioning these strikes would be “the real game changer,” Andrii Ziuz, the former chief executive of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council and current head of technology at London-based company Prevail, told Newsweek.
“Close to the front lines, ammunition depots are much smaller and more dispersed,” said William Freer, a research fellow in national security at the Council on Geostrategy, a U.K.-based think tank.
“For Ukraine, targeting larger ammunition depots further from the front line presents better opportunities to destroy greater amounts of Russian ammunition,” Freer told Newsweek.
The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a U.S.-based think tank, has assessed that when Ukraine used U.S.-provided High-Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, to target Russian ammunition depots in occupied territory more than two years ago, this forced Moscow to spread out its storage sites and eroded Russian logistics.
“Russian authorities are likely concerned about how moving ammunition depots and other critical storage facilities further away from the frontline and outside the range of Western-provided systems will impact Russian offensive capabilities in Ukraine,” the ISW said in late September.
