These are designed to combat Lancets, which have a standard explosive warhead, rather than against Javelins that have a shaped charge that just punches through. I suspect they will help some in this regard, but nothing major.

They almost seem more useful as how the one pictured on the left is setup, as a combination of netting and camouflage.

These structures are made much more intelligently, and do indeed protect, since there is large enough space in-between.

The “cope cage” thing was always propaganda. When US soldiers in Iraq were putting scrap steel on the floors of their HMMWVs to protect against IEDs it was called “improvised armor”.

However, those scrap metal cupolas wouldn’t likely have done anything against the Javelin or NLAW missiles and MAM-C laser-guided AP glide bombs the Ukrainians were using in the Kiev defense.

In this case the interesting thing to me is that you would expect a self-propelled gun to be engaged in “shoot-and-scoot” where it fires a few rounds and then gets out of there before the counter-battery response comes in. A cope cage isn’t going to do anything about incoming 152.4mm rounds. The fact that the Ukrainians are now apparently using static setup with “cope garages” in the treeline suggests that they don’t fear Russian counter-battery responses and the primary threat is now apparently small-warhead loitering munitions.

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