A Russian BMP with a load of dummy soldiers.
Via social media
Why did a Russian regiment pile what appear to be a bunch of dummies—yes, fake people—onto BMP fighting vehicles and roll them toward the front line outside Bilohorivka in eastern Ukraine’s Luhansk Oblast?
No one outside the regiment knows for sure. The BMPs with their fake soldiers—each wearing green Russian army fatigues—represent one of the weirder mysteries of Russia’s 22-month wider war on Ukraine.
Maybe the Russians hoped the dummies would draw the attention of the drones—grenade-dropping models as well as explosives-laden first-person-view models—that are everywhere, nearly all the time, over the 600-mile front line in Ukraine.
Both sides in Russia’s war on Ukraine already deploy decoy vehicles and aircraft to bait enemy artillery and missiles. Why not also deploy decoy soldiers to bait drones?
In any event, at least two BMPs hauling fake soldiers got knocked out before reaching their destination. Immobilized, the fighting vehicles and their equally immobile fake passengers became the object of intensive scrutiny and conjecture.
Clearly as befuddled as the rest of us are over the fake troopers but taking no chances, the Ukrainian army’s 81st Brigade eventually blew up the stranded, dummy-hauling BMPs and their faux human cargo.
Fittingly, they blew them up with grenade-dropping drones. Which, if the dummies indeed were drone-bait, pretty much is what the Russians wanted to happen.
But it’s worth calculating the cost. A drone grenade costs just a few dollars. The more expensive drone-strike option, a two-pound FPV with a pound of explosives, might cost $500.
A dummy costs $50 on Amazon.com—and the Ukrainians blew up around 10 of them, plus a pair of multi-million-dollar BMPs. It’s unclear whether the three-person crews of the BMPs survived the debacle.
And even the Russian army wouldn’t willingly risk six actual people in order to deploy a bunch of fake people just to trick the Ukrainians into wasting, at best, a handful of drones costing a few thousand dollars.
Right?
Right?
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