Demand for decoy weapons soars in Ukraine

Trade in fake guns to dupe Russians surges as enemy steps up strikes and West fails to deliver real arms

DEMAND for fake weaponry has shot up as Ukrainian troops on the front line contend with increasing Russian strikes and dwindling supplies.

Mykhailo Roman, 32, an architect who produces dummy weapons out of plywood, metal and plastic drainpipe, said he has been working overtime in recent months.

The married father of one runs a small architecture firm in Vynohradiv, a village 10 miles from the Hungarian border in south-west Ukraine – an area largely untouched by the ravages of war. By day, he mostly designs houses. But in his evenings, he has turned his skills to building a Potemkin army.

Tinkering away in a secret warehouse, Mr Roman and a group of volunteers build life-size models of missile launchers and artillery guns, designed to dupe Russia into wasting ammunition on destroying fake targets.

His team strives to make the models as “realistic and cheap as possible”. Everything lying around the workshop is used: foam blocks, used tyres, scrap wood, sheet metal and plastic tubes.

The surge in demand comes as Ukraine’s top commander, Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi, admitted that Russian forces fighting in eastern Ukraine have recently had six times more ammunition to fire than Kyiv’s troops. Over the past year, Mr Roman’s team has built more than 200 dummy Stugna antitank guided missile launchers and two D-20 howitzer artillery guns, which have been deployed across Ukraine’s front lines from Orikhiv in the south, to Donetsk and Lyman in the east, as well as Kharkiv and Sumy to the north.

He proudly posts footage on social media sent to him by Ukrainian troops of his replica weapons in action at the front.

In one video, a soldier can be heard saying: “Look how the Russians strike, the morons” while demonstrating the damage caused to the decoys by a barrage of Russian shells.

The success of Mr Roman’s team is measured by the number of their decoy weapons that are destroyed. “When they destroy them, it makes me want to build more,” he said.

The fake weaponry also has a practical benefit, helping to direct Ukraine’s strikes. “When Russian soldiers have destroyed these models, our military forces can see their positions and attack them,” Mr Roman said.

The spike in his recent production comes amid reports of an acute shell shortage on the front line as a US package of aid worth an estimated $60billion (£48billion) remains tied up in Congress.

Asked whether fake weaponry could provide a short-term solution to delays in Western aid, Mr Roman said: “The main idea of these models is to exhaust the enemy and to see their position. We need real weapons because we can win the war only with real weapons.”