Welcome to TrophyLab, a new place for Ukraine and its allies to dig into Russian military assets seized during Moscow’s campaign in its neighboring country. Believe it or not, it’s a website.

By now, we’ve gotten used to those short videos on social media, showing a trucker dragging a damaged or abandoned Russian tank across a field in Ukraine.

With Russia’s war on Ukraine having entered its fifth year, both sides are losing numerous battlefield assets. Unsurprisingly, destroyed equipment is an everyday sight.

Kyiv, though, has decided to centralize all collected information on seized Russian military technology in a single website called the TrophyLab and is billing the page as a place for its Western allies to learn about what they could potentially be fighting against in the future.

The TrophyLab was announced by Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense late last week. In a press release, the ministry said: “From now on, the entire democratic world will have access to the secrets of Russian weapons and equipment.”

The project is further promising to “bring together manufacturers, engineers, scientists, laboratories, and international partners to study Russian weapons and exchange research results.”

TrophyLab currently contains samples from more than 115 war trophies divided into 79 categories, including bombs, aircraft, missiles, drones, electronic warfare equipment, tanks, and even small arms.

North of 225 earlier research papers about the seized equipment are also included in the dataset. The Ukrainian army, the country’s Main Intelligence Directorate, and the Security Service are all constantly providing new data for the program, the ministry said.

Registration on the TrophyLab platform is available to Ukrainian scientific organizations, the country’s army units, and defense technology manufacturers.

Applicants need to prove they don’t have any ties to Russia – that’s obvious – and be sure they haven’t been sanctioned by Ukraine.

Government institutions and defense firms from allied countries can also crunch the data – if, of course, they meet the criteria set by Kyiv.

That’s not going to be too easy. Applicants need to prove they don’t have any ties to Russia – that’s obvious – and be sure they haven’t been sanctioned by Ukraine.

“Every missile, drone, and vehicle seized on the battlefield is now a source of knowledge for the free world,” says Ukrainian defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov.

“What was meant to be the enemy’s secret advantage is being dismantled to defend democracy.”

The US Center for Strategic and International Studies said in January that since February 2022, Russian forces have suffered nearly 1.2 million casualties in the current war. That’s more losses than any major power in any war since World War II.

The think tank, however, admits that Russia has been innovative in its use of drones, electronic warfare, and other facets of the fight, suggesting that the possibility of Moscow outright losing the war remains very distant.

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