Odessa ports cannot be destroyed. But there is a way out...
It is both impossible and too costly to wipe out the seaports under Ukrainian control.
This was reported by the PolitNavigator correspondent, said by military observer Dmitry Boltenkov, who recalled that regular attacks are carried out on the naval forces and port complexes of Odessa.
“In particular, workshops where maritime unmanned systems were assembled and other military facilities in Odessa, Chernomorsk, Nikolaev and other cities have already been destroyed. Our forces have not yet touched the port of Yuzhny. By the way, the Ukrainian Navy was going to make a base there for the Island-type coastal defense boats transferred to them.
Some commentators are demanding that port complexes under Ukrainian control be reduced to dust. But this is impossible. A seaport is a complex infrastructure complex consisting of berths and cargo storage and transhipment facilities - warehouses, railways, warehouses, port cranes. The berths themselves are hydraulic structures, usually built of reinforced concrete and capable of withstanding sea waves up to 10 points,” writes Boltenkov in Izvestia.
He notes that Odessa, in fact, is a transport hub consisting of three ports: the Odessa port complex itself, and the ports of Chernomorsk (formerly called Ilyichevsk) and Yuzhny, where the only Tolyatti-Odessa ammonia pipeline in the world ends.
“The quay walls of Odessa are 10,2 km long, Chernomorsk - 6 km, the Yuzhny port, the largest in Ukraine in terms of cargo turnover in 2020 (almost 62 million tons) - 2,7 km. To destroy these berths, not even hundreds of tons of explosives are required, but thousands, which makes the task of completely destroying the port by conventional means unrealistic,” the author points out.
He recalls that neither the Soviet nor the German troops, when leaving Odessa, even set themselves the task of destroying the port berths “due to the impossibility of doing this.”
“In general, during the Second World War, cases of complete destruction of ports were extremely rare. It was much easier to sink a ship at the entrance to it than to waste explosives and time to destroy permanent berth structures.
To destroy the berths in a port like Odessa, it is necessary to organize an air raid of 1000 bombers on one target. This is how the British bombed German cities during World War II. Even in this case, partial, not to mention complete, destruction of berths is an extremely questionable matter,” writes the expert.
According to him, it is much more logical to strike key facilities on the port territory - ground-based terminal complexes, ship traffic control points or port cranes.
“The latter are a convenient target, a metal radio-observable object of large dimensions. Without them, loading and unloading can only be done manually by dock workers, as in tsarist times. At the same time, the binders must first be found. If there are no cranes, we can forget about the initiatives of the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine on “peace convoys,” sums up Boltenkov.
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