NEW DELHI: Amid the ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia, Ukrainian steelworkers at Metinvest are outsmarting Russian troops with realistic-looking fake weapons.
According to a report in the Financial Times, steelworkers are using scrap wood, metal and used tires to mimic advanced defence systems such as howitzers, radar systems and mortar launchers at Ukraine’s largest steel plant.

The workers at Metinvest have produced more than 250 decoy weapons for Ukrainian troops, deceiving Russian forces into expending their valuable ammunition on these counterfeit weapons.

According to the report, the steelworkers began their operation in the face of approaching Russian forces in the plant in central-eastern Ukraine, last February.
“We used boxes, plastic, and any materials available here — even items discarded in the trash that we could find to make decoy weapons,” the enterprise chief of a Metinvest facility told. “We were outgunned but we made it look like our army was big and strong and that we were ready to fight.”
“It worked! We scared them off,” he said.

As the conflict continued, Ukraine expanded its use of decoys, introducing radar reflectors made from old Russian oil barrels. Remarkably, these decoys cost just about 1,000 Euros to produce, a fraction of the $1.1 million missiles that Russian troops would employ to destroy them.
The enterprise chief emphasised that their success was determined by the destruction of these decoys, which signified the preservation of their genuine weapons and the lives of their soldiers, while simultaneously depleting the enemy’s valuable arsenal. The adaptability of their designs played a crucial role in the ongoing effectiveness of this strategy, Financial times reported.
It is notable that militaries have long used decoy weapons to outmanoeuvre their opponents, such as inflatable tanks in WWII and parachuting dummies meant to simulate an airborne invasion leading up to D-Day.
Ukrainian troops have increasingly relied on such cunning strategies and opportunistic attacks to fend off Russian forces, including the creation of wooden replicas of tanks crafted from empty 155mm shell boxes.