Misplaced faith in western 'super-weapons" has led Ukrainian forces to primitive trickery in the face of disarmament and defeat.
Stretched thin amid ammunition shortages and dwindling personnel, Kiev’s troops have reportedly begun using dummy weapons.
That’s right — fake weapons are being lugged out by soldiers into the combat zone while the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev haggles with its Western patrons over military aid, according to posts on social media.
A batch of volunteers are said to be putting their design skills to use, making dummy weapons from scrap metal, plywood, foam blocks, used tyres, and plastic drainpipes for months now.
Life-size models of everything from artillery guns to missile launchers are being cobbled together, with the “engineers” trying to make the models as “realistic and cheap as possible”.
One such team has become quite handy at building fake Stugna anti-tank guided missile launchers and D-20 howitzer artillery guns. They boasted they were knocking out the imitations at a rapid pace, slashing the price of an imitation missile launcher to just 1,000 hryvnia (around $25).
Mykhailo Roman — one of the designers — posted footage on social media allegedly sent to him by Ukrainian troops of his dummy weapons at the front.
Roman felt driven to boost "production" amid the growing shortage of shells in the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
A UK media report quoted Roman as boasting he had even received a commission to custom-design a dummy Patriot missile system.
A real-deal US-made mobile surface-to-air missile defense system costs around $1 billion, with the added cost of another $1billion for software and the missiles. But Roman hopes to assemble one for around $10,000.
The dummy will likely make up for the loss of Two Patriot systems destroyed by a strike by a Russian Iskander hypersonic surface-to-surface missile in the Donetsk People’s Republic town of Pokrovsk on March 9. The Russian Defense Ministry shared footage of the destruction of one of the most sophisticated weapons that Washington had provided to Kiev.
Throughout NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine, Russia’s military-industrial complex has been displaying its superiority in both tanks and aircraft over Western-supplied equipment, laying bare NATO's vulnerability in the special military operation zone where its equipment becomes fair game.