Russian MOD/The Wrong_Side_Telegram
- Ukraine's decoys are getting more and more convincing, with the latest an elaborate radar array.
- Ukrainian company Metinvest said Russia had blasted one of its dummy P-18 radars with a missile.
- Ukrainian media said pro-Russian sites were sharing a video of the strike, unaware it was a fake.
A company that makes decoys for the Ukrainian armed forces said Russia had been fooled by an elaborate fake radar array and had used up expensive ammunition to destroy it.
It's the latest win claimed by Metinvest, a Ukrainian steel company that, among other things, manufactures detailed decoys for use by the country's armed forces.
In a Facebook post on Wednesday, the company said that Russian troops had struck a mock-up of the Ukrainian P-18 Malachite radar, unable to tell the difference between a fake and the real thing.
The company shared images of the decoy, which comes equipped with a rotating array and a camouflaged base — just like the real thing — before and after the strike.
—OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) September 14, 2023
Video of a missile strike began circulating on pro-Russian social media on Tuesday, described by one Telegram group as being a successful strike on a P-18 radar in the direction of the district of Mariinski.
Ukrainian outlet Militarnyi geolocated the site in the video, with a distinctive triangular field, to the Dnipropetrovsk region bordering Donetsk, which is consistent with the Telegram group's description.
Metinvest did not give the date or location of the reported strike, and Insider was unable to independently confirm the Russian video.
Metinvest says it has made at least 250 fakes to lure the Russians into targeting them, including fake M777 howitzers.
As opposed to the exceedingly expensive kit they're meant to imitate, the decoys cost in the low thousands of dollars to make — and can lure Russian forces into striking them with expensive missiles and drones.
A company spokesperson told CNN: "War is expensive and we need the Russians to spend money using drones and missiles to destroy our decoys."
Decoys are made from materials as humble as sewer pipes and plywood, the company told CNN, but it still uses a proportion of metal in order to approximate a convincing heat signature.
Metinvest is owned by Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Ahmetov, a billionaire who has been a longtime political adversary of Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.