Ukraine is actively replacing howitzers, tanks, mortars, and radars on the battlefield with dummies to force Russian troops to waste drones, missiles, and shells.
Source. This was reported by CNN.
The Ukrainian mining and metallurgical company Metinvest is engaged in the production of dummies. "After each hit, the military gives us the wreckage. If the dummy was destroyed, we did not work in vain," a Metinvest representative told CNN.
According to him, the faster it is destroyed, the higher the quality of the product: if it is not fired at for too long, engineers improve the drawings.
The Russian military has already destroyed many hundreds of models, says the Metinvest representative, and the company does not have time to meet the demand from the military. In addition, it has to quickly adapt production.
Initially, the models were rather crude, and the goal was to deceive the enemy by showing that the Ukrainian Armed Forces were better equipped than they really were.
The supply of Western equipment forced the company to invent new ways to make prototype-like models, especially as more and more sophisticated weapons are arriving in Ukraine.
"War is expensive, and we need to make the Russians spend money by using drones and missiles to destroy our dummies. Drones and missiles are expensive, and our models are much, much cheaper," explains the Metinvest representative.
For example, the 155-millimeter M777 howitzer, which is in service with many NATO countries and is currently being used in Ukraine, costs up to $4 million, while Metinvest makes a dummy of it out of ordinary sewer pipes for $1,000.
The lack of weapons forces Ukraine's military to be inventive.
"We are trying to combine combat experience with military cunning, to deceive the enemy, to invent some new traps," special forces commander Yuriy Mikulyak told CNN.
Russian leaders have repeatedly overestimated the number of destroyed Ukrainian vehicles. For example, in June 2023, Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev reported to Putin that Ukrainians had lost 246 tanks since the start of the counteroffensive. However, in reality, Ukrainian troops lost almost six times fewer tanks during that period.