No indication yet that this was a Ukrainian rocket attack, drone attack, or even partisan sabotage. But it sounds militarily significant.
Local officials in Russia say an explosion at an optical plant in the city of Sergiyev Posad, about 70 kilometers outside Moscow, killed one person and injured at least 43 people on August 9.
Five of the injured are in intensive care with serious burns or head injuries, according to the city administration’s Telegram account. Some of the 43 people admitted to a regional hospital have shrapnel injuries, it said.
Officials at the city’s central hospital said that a woman had succumbed to wounds sustained in the blast.
Independent Telegram channel Baza shared images of a tall cloud of smoke and identified the site as the Zagorsk Optical and Mechanical Plant, which produces night-vision and other optical devices for the military.
Russian officials later confirmed the location.
Russian news agency TASS has quoted the emergency services as rejecting assertions on social media that the cause of the blast was a drone attack.
That speculation has been fueled by months of remote attacks in Russia that Moscow blames on Kyiv along with Russian reports it “thwarted” two fresh drone attacks near Moscow overnight.
TASS said the blast happened where pyrotechnics were being kept and destroyed a 1,600-square-meter warehouse.
An unexplained fire damaged the same Zagorsk plant in June 2022.
Seemed to blow up real good:
You can’t trust TASS, and it’s entirely possible that it’s your standard negligent Russian military industrial accident. But why would you store pyrotechnics next to an optics factory?
Other news notes that the plant makes optics for Russian security forces. Keep in mind that obtaining optical sights for their tanks has been an ongoing concern for Russia.
Developing…
Tags: Foreign Policy, Military, Russia, Russo-Ukrainian War, Sergiyev Posad, tanks, video
“Pyrotechnics” in this case apparently defined to include the artillery shells that are being seen on local video thrown hither and yon by the explosion:
https://twitter.com/sentdefender/status/1689255891562897408
There are three, maybe four possibilities with all of these “industrial accidents”:
One, there is an extensive Ukrainian sabotage operation inside Russia.
Two, there are a bunch of Ukrainian sympathizers inside Russia who’re silently acting against the regime.
Three, this is theater, intended to serve as disinformation about actual Russian reality in the factories supporting the war. Alternatively, they could be setting up a situation wherein they can claim “Well, we’d have won the war, but all those factories burned down…” Wheels within wheels, so to speak.
Fourth option? The Russian factory worker really is that incompetent and the nonexistent “safety culture” is catching up with them as they mobilize actual experienced people and try to ramp up production…
Knowing what I know of Russian industry, it’s pretty much my guess that when they came through looking for people to turn into mobiks, the hierarchy took care of its own, and the remnant Shtakanovite types were the ones snaffled up into the forces. And, since those guys were likely the ones keeping everything ticking over…? Yeah.
Who the hell knows, though? It’s not like we’ve had good visibility into any of this BS, ever. The stories I heard and read from the guys who set up all the industrial plants in the Soviet Union back in the day were something else. Nobody but the Russians run things the way the Russians do, and that’s a large part of why they’re still effectively an “industrial colony” of the West… They don’t, and may not be able to, build their own machinery. See Kamil Galeev for detailed analysis of that fact.
“Fourth option? The Russian factory worker really is that incompetent and the nonexistent “safety culture” is catching up with them as they mobilize actual experienced people and try to ramp up production…”
Um…Yeah.
FAFO.
ZOMZ is Russia’s leading manufacturer of photometers and flame photometers. Russia’s number two manufacturer of microscopes, concentrating on specialty ‘scopes. Don’t think they have made military optics since 1994, when the sector got downsized by the Yeltsin government.
ZOMZ has a glass foundry which produces a lot of exotic glass blanks. These foundries frequently suffer fires and explosions because a lot of magic ingredients in the glass recipes are hazardous, and the temperatures challenge the equipment used. Even regular float glass plants go bang every once and awhile. Guardian blew up their glass plant in DeWitt, Iowa in June 2017 in an explosion eerily similar to the ZOMZ incident.
We typically blow up one glass plant a year here in the U.S. It is a dangerous business.
Russian manufacturing output is heavily dependent on foreign sourced high end technology. It may be that sanctions have left them unable to replace safety monitoring equipment. This, coupled with the frenzied pace of military production may have overtaxed the process and led to this, and similar disasters.
“Pyrotechnics” in this case apparently defined to include the artillery shells that are being seen on local video thrown hither and yon by the explosion:”
The object in the Twit photograph is almost certainly an HPTR cold pilgering mandrel, not an artillery shell. These are used in the early stages of precision thinwall tube forming, such as making steel or aluminum riflescope tubes. Russian news reports indicate that Piro-Russ warehouse which blew up was immediately adjacent to a ZOMZ storage warehouse. Both buildings were leveled in the blast, along with ZOMZ’s fab facilities in two other halls.
Soviet and Russian 122mm & 152mm artillery shells have a bore rider ring at the ogive transition and only a single driving band at the the transition to their bases.