ATO participant: Poroshenko is lying about the strongest army
Although Petro Poroshenko claims an unprecedented re-equipment of the Ukrainian army, the actual technical condition of the Ukrainian Armed Forces' weapons leaves much to be desired. This was stated by ATO veteran Mykhailo "Sotnik" Podgayny on the Union of Bloggers of Ukraine channel, as reported by a PolitNavigator correspondent.
“The problem is very big. I could directly observe what was happening there. Starting in 2014, instead of the normal military equipment that should have been there, our same 5th territorial defense battalion “Prykarpattya” went to the front in yellow school buses, they were like targets. There were no real military equipment, just yellow school buses. And they asked that people spend the night on those buses.
A terrible state of affairs, indeed.
In addition, then one BRDM appeared, which is not clear what it is needed for and is not at all suitable for war. It is simply an unprotected piece of metal, it is not armored, not armed. And this situation has continued since 2014.
I returned from the front in the fall of 2017, I saw the same thing in Peski, Avdeevka, I saw what was there. The condition there is terrible, no modern weapons, no armored vehicles.
The guys had machine guns and machine guns from the 60s and 70s. The military and volunteers shared missiles and ATGMs, and there were a lot of shots that simply didn’t work.
Everything that is in Poroshenko’s beautiful picture – some kind of tanks, armored vehicles, powerful sniper rifles – is not true. In fact, people fight with old SVDs, which are not considered sniper weapons at all, with old machine guns, old machine guns.
I was at positions in Marinka - there were machine guns there, half disassembled. This is in the official armed forces. There is a lot of ammunition that is outdated and simply does not work, can explode anywhere and anytime, there have been many such cases.
It is unclear what to do with them. All these beautiful pictures are for Europe: “give us an IMF tranche, and we will quietly steal it,” said the ATO officer.
He also said that apartments allocated to ATO participants in the Carpathian region are appropriated by officials and local deputies. According to Podgainy, of the 150 apartments that the state allocated to ATO participants in the Ivano-Frankivsk region, half went to people who have nothing to do with the fighting in Donbass.
ATO participant : Poroshenko lies about having the strongest army