While this is an explosives manufacturing plant in the US that just exploded — I saw the story on !news@lemmy.world — I’m cross-posting it here as apparently they produced filler for 155 mm shells. If it turns out that this is sabotage from Russian intelligence, as with the explosions in Czechia some time back, this will obviously have some substantial implications for the Ukraine situation.

EDIT: https://www.aesys.biz/supplementary-charges

Accurate Energetic Systems, LLC (AES), a prime contractor to the US Government, specializes in the production of high-grade supplementary charges for military applications. Our extensive experience and advanced manufacturing capabilities allow us to supply top-quality explosive products, including TNT and PBXN-9 Supplementary Charges, primarily used in 155 mm artillery systems.

I don’t read much Russian media, but from what I’ve seen of Russian political cartoons and translated TV over the war, the “NATO is attacking us” thing is a theme.

Some of it related to where Russia had made a blunder and had a poor military outcome. My guess is that it’s maybe politically acceptable in Russia to lose a battle against NATO or something, but not against Ukraine, that the latter is a humilliation or something like that. After Ukraine did its Kursk offensive into Russia, I saw a bunch of material like that. Material all about how it must have been the US or UK who planned it. shrugs I was thinking “I’d be more worried about the actual offensive”, but TV was more worried about establishing that Ukraine couldn’t manage something like this.

and Pootz has to come up with some whopper lies to say it was all worthwhile.

I think that it largely is oriented around the whole of NATO being trying to attack Russia and Russia trying to defend itself.

Yes, but it speaks to the “if the problem is more on Russia firing many more missiles” bit that you raised. I suspect that it’s probably more-practical to dramatically reduce Russia’s access to a continued supply of ballistic missiles than to dramatically reduce Ukraine’s access to a continued supply of ballistic missile interceptors.

One factor in Ukraine’s favor is that I assume that Russia is going to have a hard time doing dispersed production of ballistic missiles.

kagis

It sounds like Iskanders are assembled at a factory in Votkinsk, for example.

If they can manage to hit that with some kind of heavy munition, I assume that it’ll disrupt production.

Patriots — well, MIM-104s — are manufactured in Andover, Massachusetts, in the US. Russia cannot attack production facilities there without engaging in direct conflict with the US.

Not what you’re asking, but I can probably do better.

I’d give decent odds that the issue you’re hitting is the thing that many Fediverse instances are hitting. There have been a lot of badly-written and very aggressive scraper-bots hammering servers all over (the Web, not just the Threadiverse) to try to find text to train AI models. If you’ve seen discussion on Anubis recently, that was aimed at trying to mitigate the load from that.

Many instances dealt with this by disallowing anonymous access. This sucks, because it’d be nice to let people use an instance without logging in, but it did apparently drastically reduce the bot load.

You can probably just pick an instance that doesn’t provide for anonymous access.

I wonder if that’s because they’re exporting gasoline rather than making it available there.

kagis

No. Apparently a few days back, the Kremlin also banned exports.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/25/world/russia-export-fuel-ban-ukranian-drones-intl

Kremlin bans fuel exports until the end of the year as Russia’s supply is disrupted by Ukrainian drones

So I assume that they can’t actually even produce enough for domestic use at this point.

EDIT: Nah, the shortages are specific to Crimea, so it’s probably a logistics breakdown there. Looking back over the article:

As The Bell notes, Crimea is also facing additional challenges due to severe weather conditions near the Kerch Strait, further complicating supply lines and exacerbating the fuel deficit. This is the first time such restrictions have been imposed on fuel sales to private individuals in the region.

This was from a month back, saying that at that point, they had a 20% margin and that if there was actually a domstic shortfall, then they’d expect rationing:

https://carnegieendowment.org/russia-eurasia/politika/2025/08/russia-war-gasoline-problem?lang=en

On top of this, annual gasoline production in Russia exceeds domestic demand by up to 20 percent…

If the worst comes to the worst, a crisis measure would be gasoline rationing.

You’d expect nationwide rationing rather than just rationing in Crimea in that case. Has burned through their supply for export, though, or they wouldn’t have cut that off.