I didn’t see this one coming — Russian soldiers are now having to defend against Russian weapons from being re-smuggled out of Ukraine and back into Russia:
Over 60 miles of trenches, four meters (13 feet) wide and two meters (six feet) deep, have been dug in Ukraine’s Rostov region, adjacent to the restive Donetsk and Luhansk regions, to prevent arms and munitions from being carried into Russia. Over 60 smuggling attempts have been stopped, leading to the detention of 130 people and the confiscation of land mines, firearms, artillery shells and grenades, the Moscow newspaper Rossiskaya Gazeta said.
“The separatist regions of Ukraine have become a territory of uncontrolled weapons circulation and arms always flow into the black market in a period of de-escalation,” military analyst Anton Lavrov told Bloomberg News. The weapons could arrive in nearby North Caucasus, a largely Muslim region of Russia where militants have battled federal troops for over 20 years.
The longer this war goes on, the more tempted Kyiv may be to start providing weapons, money, and training to separatist forces to the restive Muslims in Russia’s south Caucasus region, which in the long run would end up doing nobody any good.
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