Translated material
I really want money
The Transnistrian authorities are not giving up hope of making money on Russian ammunition
Yesterday in Transnistria an incident unprecedented in the post-Soviet space occurred. While the former republics of the USSR are trying in every possible way to receive financial and other injections from the West, a representative of the administration of the unrecognized republic refused European assistance. He stated that Pridnestrovie does not need the equipment purchased by the OSCE for the disposal of ammunition from the former 14th Combined Arms Army. We are talking about the Luthe melting furnace and the Donovan detonation chamber.Initially, it was assumed that a third of the 42 thousand tons of ammunition stored in the warehouses of the 14th Army would not be exported to Russia. However, it later became clear that there are significantly fewer such ammunition and they can be destroyed by detonation. The statistics are as follows: in March-June 2003, about 14 tons of weapons and ammunition were exported from Transnistria to Russia. In the second half of June, the Transnistrian side suspended exports, demanding that Tiraspol write off $100 million from the debt for Russian gas. This is not the first time this demand has been put forward, but Moscow is in no hurry to satisfy it. According to a source in the Russian military department of the Vremya Novostei newspaper, enterprising people from the Transnistrian administration simply decided to make money by disposing of the mountain of ammunition left over from the “army of General Lebed.” What prompted them to do this was the message about the successful completion of tests of industrial explosives produced using a special technology during the disposal of obsolete ammunition.
At the Granit-Kuznechnoye deposit in the Leningrad region, several explosions were carried out using charges based on so-called gelpores, which were obtained from discarded ammunition. Gelpores have many advantages: they are much safer to use than other industrial explosive materials - they do not ignite under mechanical shock or thermal influence. The cost of blasting operations is reduced by half, and the consumption of explosives is reduced by the same amount.
Magic gelpores, say the experts who conducted the tests, are nothing more than a mixture of grains from artillery gunpowder of various brands, tactical missile fuel, and hexogen-containing bombs. All this stuff in Transnistria, the Russian military officer said, is “in bulk.” All that remains is to obtain technical means capable of producing gelpores. On the basis of one of the arsenals of the Russian Navy, an experimental production complex for the disposal of explosives with a capacity of up to 20 tons per month was created and approved for operation; in the future, the figure may well increase to 100 tons.
Until now, less than a fifth of recycled explosives have been converted into industrial explosives. The rest was burned, blown up, flooded or melted down (including in smelting furnaces and detonation chambers provided to Transnistria by the OSCE), causing irreparable harm to the environment. The new technology is quite revolutionary; many countries have already become interested in it. Moreover, the need for gunpowder necessary for the production of gelpore in Russia alone is 3000 tons per year.
According to our source in the Russian Ministry of Defense, the Transnistrian authorities, desperate to get their gas debts written off, decided to make good use of the military wealth inherited from the Soviet Union. As for the possibility of selling the technology for producing gelpore and the corresponding production for the disposal of ammunition, an interested private company from a third country can bring them to the unrecognized republic.