Russian pilots’ wives duped into posing for fake ‘calendar girls’ snaps – exposing identities of Putin’s ‘war criminals’

UKRAINE duped the wives of Russian pilots to pose for a “calendar girls” photo shoot to reveal their husbands' identities.

A dozen women posed together wearing their husbands’ medals in front of a Russian fighter jet.

They thought were making a calendar to boost their husbands’ morale at the request of the Russian Air Force.

Most of them wore high heels and mini skirts.

They were “only too happy to help,” The Times reported.

But they had been tricked Ukrainian activists from the InformNapalm group.

The Ukrainein "hacktivists" used the image to identify the pilots of the 960th Assault Aviation Regiment who they suspect of committing war crimes.

And they passed their findings to investigators at the International Criminal Court in the Hague.

The 960th Assault Aviation Regiment stands accused of killing some 600 civilians, many of them children, in an airstrike in a theatre in the besieged city of Mariupol in 2022.

InformNapalm launched its ruse by approaching Lillia Astroshchenko, wife of regiment’s commanding officer Colonel Sergey Astroshchenko, 43, pretending to be a colleague.

As the wife of the most senior officer in the regiment she was able to convince the other women to take part.

All of the women wore their husband’s dress jackets, complete with gold embroidered epaulets and badges revealing their ranks.

Campaign medals pinned to their chests also revealed where the pilots had served, and allowed the investigators to cross-reference records to find their husbands’ identities.

Mykhailo Makaruk from InformNapalm said: “We’ve caused [the Russians] quite a lot of trouble over the years.”

The group was founded in 2014 when Russia seized control of Crimea and fomented rebellions in Donbas.