Guns of Ukraine war picture thread

[aroyobob]

MG42 type held by someone with an Azov patch. Something else on the table.

[Suck My Glock]

Here is the NATO Secretary General greeting Slovakian soldiers maintaining the border with Ukraine. The Slovaks are still using the VZ58, even though they are currently transitioning to the BREN 805.


Here we see another Tavor, with a PK in the background.


Here is yet another group of volunteers with their privately owned weapons, outfitted with commercial kit. Notice the HK G36k, the full size AR15A2 and the suppressed Steyr AUG.

[aroyobob]

Described as equipment brought by combatants from Georgia.
CZ 806 Bren-2 on the left and a Beretta MG 42/52 on the right.

[Suck My Glock]

This is Anya Kyrychenko, 9 years old, from just outside Mariupol. These were obviously posed PR pictures, taken by her father and holding his shotgun. These pics were posted 6 days ago. Since then, Mariupol has been encircled. No one knows where Anya or her father are now and can't be reached.

[Suck My Glock]

Here's another volunteer, this one with a Ruger American and suppressor, hoping to be a sniper.


This guy has an expensive system there,...but no optic? Odd.

[Suck My Glock]

Kel-Tec and Adams Arms donating weapons to Ukraine freedom fighters

https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukrai ... 4a0e2b73cd

MIAMI (AP) — Adrian Kellgren’s family-owned gun company in Florida was left holding a $200,000 shipment of semi-automatic rifles after a longtime customer in Ukraine suddenly went silent during Vladimir Putin’s invasion of the country.

Fearing the worst, Kellgren and his company KelTec decided to put those stranded 400 guns to use, sending them to Ukraine’s nascent resistance movement to help civilians fight back against a Russian military that has been repeatedly shelling their apartment buildings, schools, hospitals and hiding places.

“The American people want to do something,” said Kellgren, a former U.S. Navy pilot. “We enjoy our freedoms, we cherish those things. And when we see a group of people out there getting hammered like this, it’s heartbreaking.”

Cocoa-based KelTec’s donation is a high-profile example of Americans collecting guns, ammunition, body armor, helmets and other tactical gear in response to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s promise to arm his citizens. But many similar grassroots efforts have been snarled by inexperience with the complex web of regulations governing the international shipment of such equipment.

Kellgren, who has dealt with such red tape for years, managed to connect through a Ukrainian neighbor with a diplomat in the Ukrainian Embassy who helped him secure a federal arms export license in just four days. That process can often take months.

This week, as Congress debated whether to send more advanced weapons and defense systems to Ukraine, workers at KelTec’s warehouse forklifted four plastic-wrapped pallets containing their 9 mm foldable rifles for delivery to an undisclosed NATO-run facility. From there, the shipment’s new recipient, Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense, will be responsible for smuggling the weapons into the war zone.

“That’s when the real derring-do and heroism begins,” Kellgren said.

From California to New York, elected officials, sheriff’s departments and nonprofits say they have also collected thousands of sets of body armor and millions of rounds of ammunition for Ukraine.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis kicked off a campaign last week to ask police and sheriff’s departments to donate surplus ballistic helmets and other equipment. “We know that it can urgently be used to help stop Putin and save Ukraine,” he said.

But hazards abound: One New York City nonprofit leading an effort to collect tactical gear had 400 bulletproof vests stolen before they could be dispatched.

Many of the organizers have no clue how to navigate international arms export rules, which sometimes require approvals from the Departments of State, Commerce and Defense to ship even non-lethal tactical gear. Organizers of one such drive in New York are piggybacking on KelTec’s license to export 60 long guns they recently collected.

“I’m hoping that this movement spreads through the whole United States and every gun store and every gun manufacturer in the U.S. accepts these donations,” Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman said at a news conference Friday.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade group for firearms manufacturers, distributed step-by-step instructions this week to its more than 8,000 members on how to apply for an expedited export license. They also provided a list of specific sniper rifles, pistols and ammo requested by Ukraine’s Embassy in Washington.

KelTec hopes to arrange more shipments in the future. Its license allows the export of up to 10,000 weapons and the company has offered the Ukrainians their own production line and weekly shipments.

Details of KelTec’s efforts surfaced in a Justice Department filing this week by a Maryland-based real estate lawyer, Lukas Jan Kaczmarek, who said that as a volunteer with the Ukrainian-American Bar Association he is helping Ukraine acquire weapons in tandem with Volodymyr Muzylov, the first secretary at the Ukraine Embassy.

“I expect to work in this capacity for the duration of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and I have not, am not, and shall not receive any monetary compensation for my assistance,” Kaczmarek wrote in his registration as a foreign agent of the Zelenskyy government.

KelTec isn’t the only arms manufacturer to have answered the call.

Another Florida company, Adams Arms, posted on its Facebook account a video of what it said is a shipment of carbine rifles destined for Ukraine. The company has also started selling T-shirts emblazoned with the iconic final broadcast of a bombarded Ukrainian Border Guard unit that told a Russian warship to “Go (expletive) Yourself!” Proceeds from shirt sales will go to the Ukrainian National Bank’s war funds.

While rifles are no match for Putin’s firepower of Sukhoi fighter jets and cluster bombs, they can play an important role if the Russians get bogged down in street-to-street combat, retired U.S. Army Major John Spencer said.

The semi-automatic rifles KelTec is shipping are perhaps even more valuable than high-tech, anti-aircraft missiles that require extensive training beyond the reach of most civilians, many of whom have never even held a gun before, he said.

“Every shipment of firearms is critical,” said Spencer, an urban warfare analyst at the Madison Policy Forum, a New York-based think tank. “You’re giving one more fighter, out of tens of thousands, the opportunity to resist with a simple-to-use weapon.”

Kellgren said he’s been inspired by the resourcefulness and tenacity of Ukrainian citizens and is confident the rifles he’s sending will make a difference.

“The people of Ukraine have had mostly just civilian firearms and they’re holding off a superpower,” he said. “So the X-factor here not isn’t necessarily what equipment you’re holding. ... It comes down to the will to fight.”

[aroyobob]

Here's a new one from @UAWeapons.

We believe these rifles were donated by one of the Baltic states. In the late 90s Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia received huge quantities of M14 rifles from the US. Hopefully this donation included stocks of ammunition for it.

[MarkItZero]

How has there not been one PPS?

[Suck My Glock]

How has there not been one PPS?

Actually, I found one pic of a dude with a PPS43, if you look back on page 1. But yeah, I expected to find a buttload of old PPSh41s and such, but apparently they gave all those away to Vietnam and other hotspots during the Cold War. Even the 7.62 AKs are pretty uncommon for the same reason. Once they started converting over to 5.45x39 in earnest, they started giving away the old stuff as party favors to all troublemakers around the globe up until 1990. And then, they started selling them for hard cash on the open arms market.

Actually, during the run up to the partition of the country in 2014, sympathizers of the ethnic Russian factions did all sorts of skullduggery to liberate weapon stocks into the hands of the Russian-aligned groups. If you look at the pictures from 2014 on until before the invasion last month, you find the Russian breakaway dudes are often armed with the old stuff, because that's what they were able to secure for themselves back when this all began. When Russia started offering help and supply, they just started giving away lots of other old stuff, because it made logistics simple, and Russia didn't really need all that old 7.62x39 ammo laying around anyway.

[That Guy]

Here's a new one from @UAWeapons.

We believe these rifles were donated by one of the Baltic states. In the late 90s Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia received huge quantities of M14 rifles from the US. Hopefully this donation included stocks of ammunition for it.


M14.jpg

The M-14’s were provided to the Baltic’s under the US Military Assistance Program. In the case of Lithuania they were VERY hot to get M-14’s when Estonia received a bunch. A former retired US Army infantry full colonel named Jonas Kronkaitis (Lithuanian-American) returned to Lithuania to help/assist their military. He was a HUGE M-14 fan and later became their minister of defense. In the case of Lithuania they had to pay for the packing and shipping of the rifles from Anniston to Vilnius. Winchester later built a brand new factory (where all that GGG ammo comes from) in Lithuania to feed them. I know Lithuania also got rebuilt 1911A1’s from Anniston (prior to acquiring the M-14’s). There are a number of different aspects to the Military Assistance Program one of them being that the country receiving them technically doesn’t actually own them i.e. if they transfer, sell, or destroy the items they must get permission from the USG (remember all those M-1 Garands and carbines South Korea wanted to return to CONUS during the Obama Administration? Same deal). I suspect the USG has either given permission before or after the fact if M-14’s were indeed given to Ukraine. My gut feeling is that while all three of the Baltic’s hate the Russians the Lithuanians hate them the most hence those M-14 probably came from there.

[Suck My Glock]

Looked for anymore pics of M14s in Ukraine and found this one.


Also found another local and his locally made shotgun.


This guy has a Fort 230, a Ukrainian made 9mm PDW type SMG.

[aroyobob]

Looks like the selector switch on the M-14 rifles has been replaced with the button, locking them in semi only mode.

[kenpoprofessor]

Looks like the selector switch on the M-14 rifles has been replaced with the button, locking them in semi only mode.

Doesn't quite work like that. Semi auto requires a different trigger, safety selector, and disconnector. Unless of course, they've designed something different I'm not aware of.

Have a great, gun carryin', Kenpo day

Clyde

[aroyobob]

Looks like the selector switch on the M-14 rifles has been replaced with the button, locking them in semi only mode.

Doesn't quite work like that. Semi auto requires a different trigger, safety selector, and disconnector. Unless of course, they've designed something different I'm not aware of.

Have a great, gun carryin', Kenpo day

Clyde

Post 4 here has good closeup pictures of the selector lock vs. selector switch.
https://www.milsurps.com/showthread.php?t=30786

another picture. It's not intended to be permanent and just takes drifting the pin out and replacing the selector lock with the switch (assuming you have a switch.)

[kenpoprofessor]

Post 4 here has good closeup pictures of the selector lock vs. selector switch.
https://www.milsurps.com/showthread.php?t=30786

another picture. It's not intended to be permanent and just takes drifting the pin out and replacing the selector lock with the switch (assuming you have a switch.)
m14lock.jpg

Ah, thank you, I was thinking of a completely different gun for some reason.


Have a great, gun carryin', Kenpo day

Clyde