Russia-Ukraine Flash Report for 6-17-22 10:45 PDT - OPSEC Fail of the Week
Added 2022-06-17 17:46:59 +0000 UTCA nice young man is holding a large mortar shell in a picture released yesterday. Look at all of this ammunition behind me. See all of it? Piled to the ceiling! No one will ever realize that I'm standing in the Expodonbass Exhibition Center in Donetsk.
The Expodonbass Exhibition Center was attacked by Ukraine today, and the ammunition has been cooking off all day. Shells and GRAD rockets are exploding out of the center-turned ammo storage facility and landing in random areas.
Local officials are claiming the explosions are caused by Ukrainian artillery - local social media users on VK aren't having it.
After 17 weeks of the war, we continue to be amazed at how poor Russian Operational Security (OPSEC) is. This is the second massive ammunition depot destroyed in the last 24 hours.
Comments
The only explanation I can come up with is actually worse than just poor opsec. By now, the Russian command has to know of the multiple instances of "Post a picture and die" - but for some reason they're not sending this information down the line and confiscating phones. (Certainly, the soldier in the picture should be courts martialed.) They're not doing it because they can't tell their own troops just how bad it's gotten, because they know that the troops would tell their families "We're getting hurt badly, and there aren't any traces of [neo]Nazis anywhere!" I think if someone wanted seriously hurt their war effort, they would arrange for all the blocked news sites to be available.
Bryce Maryott
2022-06-19 15:55:50 +0000 UTC
