VLADIMIR Putin’s crumbling war machine has sunken to grotesque new lows – using Nazi-era weapons looted from museums as his battered army runs out of ammo.
Ukraine‘s “Tur” reconnaissance unit revealed it had stumbled across Nazi detonators in a Russian ammunition dump – marked with the swastika and Reichsadler eagle, stamped with the year 1934.
Ukrainian unit “Tur” discovered Nazi-era detonators in a Russian ammunition dump[/caption]
The ammo is marked with the swastika and Reichsadler eagle[/caption]
It is Mad Vlad’s latest desperate attempt to get more ammo for his brutal war in Ukraine[/caption]
“Nazi weapons are still being used to kill people,” the unit wrote on Telegram.
“The Hitler and Stalin regimes are gone, but the Putin regime has replaced them; the names differ, but the essence remains the same.
“The Russian authorities feed their people the myth of fighting fascism, while in reality they themselves are a fascist state.”
The eerie discovery dredged up memories of Moscow’s own dark pact with Adolf Hitler at the start of World War Two.
At the outbreak of World War Two, Stalin’s Soviet Union struck a pact with Hitler that carved up Poland and cemented cooperation between the two dictatorships, the Ukrainian unit wrote.
“And this is not the only case of cooperation between two totalitarian regimes,” it added.
“In August 1939 the USSR and Germany signed a commercial agreement, which was supplemented in February 1940.
“Under these arrangements the Soviet Union received military equipment, machine tools and technologies, and raw materials — including detonators for shells marked with a swastika.”
The “Tur” unit believes the Nazi detonators have been sitting in Russian depots for nearly a century, only to be dusted off now for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Even senior Ukrainian commanders say it’s part of a wider pattern of desperation.
Major Oleh Shyriaiev, who heads Ukraine’s 225th Separate Assault Regiment, told the New York Post: “We have seen many times that Russia has been using equipment from the times of the Second World War.
“This speaks to that Russia is having certain issues — there have a lot of ammunition has been used up because this war has been going on for nearly four years.
“And any type of stocks that Russia has had, it is already exhausting.”
He said Russian troops had even been spotted firing Mosin–Nagant rifles, a bolt-action weapon developed in the 1800s and dragged out of museums.
A T-62 tank at a military history museum in Russia[/caption]
Obsolete Soviet-era T-62s from museums were being repurposed in Siberia[/caption]
“The Mosin rifle was developed at the end of the 19th century, and was used in WWI and WWII, and then it was replaced at some point by something called SKS,” Major Shyriaiev explained.
“Only then came the AK-47 — so [the Mosin] is two generations prior to AKs, which in itself, is also a fairly not particularly modern piece.”
US Special Presidential Envoy Keith Kellogg told the Yalta European Strategy conference in Kyiv this week that the bizarre museum raids prove how badly Putin’s forces are faltering.
“[Russia is] pulling tanks out of mothballs, out of museums, to put on the battle line,” he said.
“They can’t operate in large movements because the Ukrainians will kill them. And Ukrainians are fighting valiantly on there.”
Moscow has also bolted WWII ship guns onto flimsy trailers, dug out early Soviet infantry fighting vehicles from storage, and begged North Korea for shells to plug the gaps.
In 2023, Vladimir Putin sent female prisoners to the frontline in Ukraine[/caption]
Convicts from the women’s correctional colony in Snezhnoye[/caption]
And this is just the latest stunt in Putin’s catalogue of shame.
Putin’s generals have also been emptying tank museums, reactivating mothballed Soviet T-62s – some more than 60 years old.
Propagandists claim the antiques have been “modernised,” but footage from the front has revealed so-called “Frankenstein tanks” with naval guns welded onto 1950s-era chassis.
The slapdash conversions, believed to involve gun parts from 1945 patrol boats, highlight the Kremlin’s dwindling armoury after losing more than 1,700 tanks in Ukraine.
The desperation reflects the grim reality in the trenches.
The battle for Bakhmut became known as the “meat grinder,” with Ukraine estimating 30,000 Russians killed there alone.
Ukrainian soldiers defending the town of Pokrovsk[/caption]
Ukrainian soldiers launch launch missiles towards Russian troops near the frontline town of Pokrovsk[/caption]
President Volodymyr Zelensky said at the time: “In less than a week, starting from the March 6, we managed to kill more than 1,100 enemy soldiers in the Bakhmut sector alone. Russia’s irreversible loss, right there.”
And in 2023, reports revealed how Russia had resorted to shipping women prisoners to the frontline for the first time as its manpower crisis spiralled.
A Ukrainian spokesman said at the time: “Last week there was a movement towards the Donetsk region of a train with reserved seats for transporting prisoners. One of the carriages was for convicted women.”
Activist Olga Romanova claimed about 100 women convicts had already been dispatched.
Tens of thousands of male prisoners – including killers and rapists – were also recruited and handed pardons if they survived six months of combat.
