Russia resorts to using Nazi weapons in Ukraine war

Russia has resorted to using decades old Nazi weapons in its war on Ukraine as the Kremlin has been forced to raid museums to help rearm and restock its meat grinder war machine.

Ukraine’s “Tur” reconnaissance unit claimed to have discovered Nazi detonators inside a Russian ammunition depot, posting photos of the cone-shaped devices inscribed with the Nazi Reichsadler eagle and swastika symbol stamped with the year 1934.

“Nazi weapons are still being used to kill people,” the unit wrote in a post to 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,” it added in its post, referencing the Kremlin’s false claim that they are fighting Nazism in Ukraine.

The discovery served as a reminder of Russia’s dark history at the start of World War II, when Soviet leader Joseph Stalin struck a deal with Nazi Germany.

“On Sept. 17, 1939, the Soviet Union treacherously attacked Poland, which had already been severely weakened by fighting with the Wehrmacht,” the unit wrote, referencing the Nazi armed forces. “This is not the only case of cooperation between two totalitarian regimes.”

“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,” it added.

The unit believes the discovered Nazi detonators are a holdover from that time, having been “preserved in Russian depots,” it wrote in the Telegram post.

It is not unusual for Russia to rely on outdated technology and munitions from early wars, according to Maj. Oleh Shyriaiev, who commands Ukraine’s 225th Separate Assault Regiment.

“We have seen many times that Russia has been using equipment from the times of the Second World War,” he told The Post on Wednesday.

“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.”

Shriaiev himself has seen Russian troops using bolt-action Mosin–Nagant rifles developed in the late 1800s, taken from Russian military museums for use on the modern battlefields of Ukraine, he said.

“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,” he said.

“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 spoke to the phenomenon during panel at the Yalta European Strategy conference in Kyiv on Monday.

“[Russia is] pulling tanks out of mothballs, out of museums, to put on the battle line,” he said, describing how Moscow is “losing” the war. “They can’t operate in large movements because the Ukrainians will kill them. And Ukrainians are fighting valiantly on there.”

Moscow has also repurposed WWII ship guns on lightly armored trailers for the war there, and tried to modernize early infantry fighting vehicles taken from storage as it scrambles to keep up its fight on Ukraine amid dwindling stockpiles, Shriaiev said.

“We also know for a fact, confirm through intelligence, that North Korea has been supplying ammunition to Russia for that reason, the lack of ammunition,” the commander said.