Crowdfunding campaign arms Ukraine with Soviet-style weapons to fight Russia

The money is going to Ukrainian officials who have opened bank accounts and published the financial information that enables donors who “want to support freedom” to send contributions to their embassy in Prague. Czech officials have provided Ukraine with a list of armaments stockpiled in Czech warehouses, and Ukrainian officials have responded to that menu by drawing up their own shopping list. The rush of donations will allow them to put the finishing touches on the transactions.

“There is such a great will to [make] the right offer of help. At the same time, there is demand. … They will need weapons to defend their country and freedom with,” said Kopecny, who leads the defense ministry’s Defense Industrial Cooperation Section. “We put these lists together, and we immediately see what could be sent, and, of course, we need financial backing.”

‘ULTIMATE TEST OF BRINKMANSHIP’: US PREPS FOR HIGH-STAKES PROXY WAR AGAINST RUSSIA IN UKRAINE

The innovative financing plan is intended to furnish the Soviet legacy or Russian-style systems familiar even to Ukrainians who have not received training from NATO forces in recent years. With Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky seeking to mobilize Ukrainian society into “all-out defense mode,” the NATO countries that inherited those weapons from their former Kremlin masters have a special opportunity to help Ukrainians resist Putin’s imperial dream.

“That’s something that we were using of the Soviet heritage that is to our advantage,” Kopecny said. “So we have stocks full of this, and we have also people who have been working with this for decades.”

As the attacking Russian forces struggle to achieve their major objectives, Ukrainian and Western officials are racing to blunt the invasion and prepare for a possible insurgency. Ukrainian men between the ages of 18 and 60 have been banned from leaving the country unless they qualify for an exemption such as medical ineligibility for service. Zelensky has also decided to release convicted Ukrainian criminals who happen to have “real combat experience” on the condition that they “compensate for their guilt in the hottest spots of the conflict.”

About 400,000 Ukrainians have fought in the war in Donbas, which unfolded over the last eight years as Russian forces tried to obscure their occupation of eastern Ukrainian territory. Some of those veterans will have received training from NATO allies, but millions of others in Ukrainian society will be unaccustomed to handling Western-style weapons.

“For some types of [NATO] weaponry — I mean assault rifles, pistols, even anti-tank missiles — you can learn within a few days, maybe weeks. But with more sophisticated weapons, it’s almost impossible to do it without years of training,” the Czech deputy defense minister said. “We have precisely those things that [the] Ukrainian military has been operating for decades, so they don’t need days, weeks. They can sit in it and operate it immediately.”

Other European states that joined the trans-Atlantic alliance in recent decades are drawing on similar resources to aid the Ukrainians, as the NATO allies nearest to Ukraine fear that a Russian victory there will set the table for increased threats against their own territory. European Union officials have announced that some member states are sending fighter jets — likely Soviet-made warplanes owned by Poland, Slovakia, and Bulgaria, as a Defense One report observed. And some allies are providing low-tech munitions to equip the mass mobilization of Ukrainians. “Lots of ammunition for Kalashnikovs, for example,” another Central European official told the Washington Examiner.

Those Soviet legacy systems complement the Western-designed anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles, which have been sent by the Baltic states and other Ukrainian neighbors. Yet not all of the Central European states are willing to join that effort. Hungary, which agreed to the imposition of economic sanctions on Russia, has declined to participate in the arming of Ukraine on the grounds that it might provoke a counterattack.

“The reason for making this decision is that such deliveries might become targets of hostile military action,” Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said Monday. “We have to ensure the security of Hungary … that we are not getting involved in that war.”

Yet the Czech initiative can provide modern armaments that are nonetheless familiar to the Ukrainian defenders because the Czech Republic inherited one of the largest defense industrial bases of the late Soviet Union. The Czech government has provided about $27 million worth of military assistance, but those private defense companies have stockpiled enough modern Russian-style weapons to function as an arsenal of Ukrainian democracy — if the Ukrainians can raise the money to buy it.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

“It’s not just ammunition. It’s also heavy weaponry, small arms rifles — it’s really a lot of things,” Kopecny said. “But it [costs] hundreds of millions of dollars.”