In addition to the latest models of military equipment, Russia supplies the terrorists of the so-called “DPR” and “LPR” with Soviet-made weapons removed from the storage bases. This conclusion can be drawn from the recent InfromNapalm investigation. The official response of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense to the request of the volunteers excludes the possibility that this military equipment was captured from the Ukrainian Armed Forces. 

On May 15, 2017, InformNapalm published an investigation based on data that was exclusively provided by hacktivists of the Ukrainian Cyber Alliance.  In the investigation “Full structure and armament of militants’ self-propelled artillery battalion disclosed”, detailed information was provided on the howitzer self-propelled artillery battalion of the 1st Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade from the 1st Army Corps of Russian occupation troops in the Donbas. In the hands of the volunteers were lists of the battalion’s personnel, information about personal transport, the structure and armament of the unit, locations, as well as the inventory of the equipment of the 1st self-propelled howitzers battery. The serial numbers of the chassis, engines, radio stations, guns, sights of the 122-mm 2S1 Gvozdika howitzers with the onboard numbers 410, 411, 412, 413, 414, 415, as well as the serial numbers of two army trucks: the Ural-4320 and the MT-LB with the onboard number 442, were found in the submitted documents.

Since the majority of the equipment, listed in the inventory, were made during the Soviet period, for objective analysis it was necessary to establish its origin. The equipment could have been captured by militants during fighting with the Ukrainian Armed Forces, or stolen during the annexation of Crimean and transferred to the Donbas, or it could have been Russian – from storage bases (as of 2017, there are about 2,000 pieces of such weapons in storage in the Russian Armed Forces).

As part of the investigation, the volunteers submitted an official request to the Ukrainian Defense Ministry and received a response: the 2S1 Gvozdika howitzers listed in the InformNapalm investigation are not and have never been in service with the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

It means we can conclude with confidence that Russia supplies the DPR an LPR militants with arms and military equipment, including the older models made during the Soviet period, through the uncontrolled areas of the Ukrainian border.  Recall that InformNapalm found that militants of the artillery battalion have the Russian military portable radio stations ARK2M Arakhis and R-178P1 Azart. The digital radio station of the sixth generation R-178P1 was adopted by the Russian Defense Ministry as recently as in 2013.

By Mikhail Kuznetsov

Translated by Svitlana Kemblowski

(Creative Commons — Attribution 4.0 International — CC BY 4.0) Information prepared specially for InformNapalm.org, an active link to the authors and our project is obligatory for any reprint or further use of the material.

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