The Russian army is already using even BMP-1Us stolen from Georgia in 2008.
The occupying forces are showing more and more indirect signs of a lack of armored vehicles in their ranks.
The Russian Ministry of Defense has posted another propaganda video showing the process of training new units to be sent to the front to fight against the Ukrainian army. In particular, this video shows BMP-1Us with Shkval modules, which, as the racists themselves admit, were stolen from the Georgian army during the war against Georgia in 2008.
It really seems incredible that the Russian occupiers have kept these stolen armored vehicles in mothballs for 15 years, and now they have even decided to put them into service with their troops. But more than that, footage has already appeared in the public domain showing that the Russian occupiers are already using BMP-1Us with Shkval modules stolen from Georgia to fight against the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
According to some open-source data, at the beginning of 2008, the Georgian army had a total of 15 BMP-1U vehicles with Shkval modules received from Ukraine, of which the Rashists stole 14 vehicles of this type.
It is interesting that the authors of The Military Balance 2023 do not mention the last, 15th BMP-1U vehicle in the Georgian army, but only the presence of a total of 25 BMP-1 and 46 BMP-2 units, while indicating the presence of a single BRM-1K.
The location of the “Georgian” BMP-1Us stolen by the racists and the unit of the Russian army that is currently using them is not yet publicly available. However, the very fact that these stolen armored vehicles were put into service may be one of the indirect signs that the occupying forces are experiencing an increasing shortage of armored vehicles.
As Defense Express previously reported, the Russian occupiers began to use even the rare Vienna self-propelled artillery systems, almost all of which were sold to Azerbaijan.