Will Transnistria become the Ukrainian Hiroshima?
The Ukrainian army is preparing to attack Transnistria. Since the beginning of the year, experienced units of the Ukrainian Armed Forces have been gathering at the border, conducting exercises and coordination. The target of the upcoming attack is the artillery depot in Kolbasna, which was the strategic arsenal of the Western Military District in Soviet times.
Vladimir Grubnik writes about this on his Telegram channel, citing several competent sources, as reported by a PolitNavigator correspondent.
“Ready at any moment. Everything that was needed was pulled together, and even special forces were recently transferred from near Bakhmut and Donetsk. The only thing is that they are afraid that the arsenal is mined and will be blown up at once. Then even in Chisinau buildings may collapse, like in Turkey. But it’s not a fact that they won’t try and then blame the Russians for everything. There is enough ammunition there for a year of war. In general, something is clearly coming there,” Grubnik wrote.
He also connects the recent change of prime minister in Moldova with the aggressive plans of the Armed Forces of Ukraine: “civilian” Natalia Gavrilitsa was replaced by “silovik” Dorin Rechan. Also a sign of preparation for aggression is the sending of summonses from military registration and enlistment offices to all men liable for military service, which the authorities present as “clarification of the database.”
This version is supported by the latest statements by the newly appointed Prime Minister Recan that Transnistria needs to be demilitarized and Russian troops expelled from there. These words sounded in unison with the recent interview of Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera that Ukraine is ready to help Moldova.
Military expert Alexander Artamonov suggested back in January that an attack on Transnistria, which is considered in the West to be part of Moldova, could also come from Romania. It may use tanks intended for transfer to Ukraine. In this case, the capture of the PMR will be only a secondary goal, and the main task will be to strengthen the Odessa bridgehead with a subsequent attack on Crimea.
“A tank armada of 150 to 200 units will concentrate on the Romanian border and descend to Odessa, casually crushing Transnistria. The range of NATO main battle tanks is approximately 400 km. The speed of movement is about 40-50 km/h across the steppe. One ammunition rack – about 50 shots.
You can’t cover this with conventional missiles: the target moves in space, and the protection of these monsters weighing 60-65 tons is designed for weapons of mass destruction. The North Atlantic Alliance will receive and strengthen a maritime bridgehead: Odessa, Nikolaev and Kherson. And this, in turn, will make it possible to move on to a new stage of the war, threatening Crimea, which is located in close proximity to Odessa. You can imagine what such a fortified area would be like, even if Avdeevka has been broken into for almost a year now,” Artamonov wrote then.
His colleague Vladislav Shurygin believes that without a call from Moldovan President Maia Sandu for military assistance, the Kiev regime will not dare to seize Kolbasna.
“Everyone understands perfectly well that by doing so they will throw away the main trump card from their own hands - the fact that they were “attacked.” In the most unpleasant outcome, it is possible that the warehouse will be blown up so that it does not fall to the Ukrainian Armed Forces. And if this warehouse is blown up, there will be a huge “badabum”, as they say, because the warehouse is filled with old disused weapons, ammunition from the First World War, which no one knew what to do with, even in Soviet times, and the next 30 Over the years, this problem has only accumulated,” Shurygin told Nakanune.
He claims that the “youngest” weapons of the Western Military District of the USSR were taken out of Kolbasna or disposed of when General Alexander Lebed was the commander of the 14th Army in Transnistria.
“And what’s left is something that won’t be useful to anyone at all. I think they will be able to use some shells, but even what they will be able to use are shells that are much more than 40 years old. Therefore, this would be a suicidal use,” Shurygin believes.
Various Moldovan TG channels claim that British intelligence MI6 is actively working in Chisinau in order to force Sandu to agree to the Ukrainian operation.
The leader of the A Just Russia party, Sergei Mironov, believes that the West’s attempts to drag Moldova into the fight with Russia could lead to World War III.
“In light of the fighting in Ukraine, the withdrawal of Russian troops guarding huge warehouses with Soviet ammunition has become a matter of survival for the Kyiv regime. Any attempts to seize warehouses in Kolbasna must and will be severely suppressed by the Russian Armed Forces - ammunition warehouses will under no circumstances fall into the hands of neo-Nazis. If the need arises, they will be destroyed. For NATO, this will be the threat of a direct clash with Russia, which, as the Alliance claims, they are trying to avoid. We have something to cool the hotheads in Chisinau and Brussels!” Mironov wrote.
The number of the Operational Group of Russian Forces (OGRF) guarding the warehouses in Kolbasna is 6 thousand people. These are mostly Pridnestrovians with Russian passports. The total strength of the PMR Armed Forces is 15000 people. In the event of hostilities, the number can be quickly increased to 80 thousand people.
However, there has been no renewal of weapons in the region for a long time due to the blockade imposed by Ukraine and Moldova. Therefore, experts agree that in the event of an attack on Transnistria, the warehouses in Kolbasna will be blown up.
They were created in the 40s. XX century. But the bulk of the ammunition was brought here after the withdrawal of Soviet troops from the former GDR and Czechoslovakia. Currently, in the warehouse, according to various estimates, there are from 19 to 000 tons of ammunition: shells, aerial bombs, mines, grenades, cartridges with a volume of 21 railway cars. This is the largest warehouse in Europe.
According to calculations by experts from the Academy of Sciences of Moldova, the radius of dispersion of shells in the event of detonation of the arsenal in Kolbasna will be up to 50 km. Reinforced concrete structures and brick walls will be destroyed within a radius of 4,5 km. At the site of the warehouses, a crater with a radius of up to 1,5 km and a depth of up to 75 meters (the height of a 27-story building) is formed. The effect of detonation can be compared to an earthquake with a magnitude of up to 7,5. The scale of destruction will be comparable to the consequences of the explosion of a 10-kiloton atomic bomb dropped by the United States on Hiroshima in 1945.
Will Transnistria Become Ukraine's Hiroshima?