Frontline business: Russian commanders accused of selling modern weapons on the black market and sending their soldiers into battle with 1970s rifles
Russian front-line officers are accused of setting up an arms-trafficking ring, selling the new equipment to clandestine buyers. While the superiors profit from these transactions, the ordinary soldiers are equipped with outdated and defective weaponry, taken from the Soviet stockpiles of the 70s, which endangers the success of the operations and the lives of the military personnel.
Russian commanders sell modern weapons on the black market PHOTO: AFP
The pro-Ukraine Atesh partisan group reported that its agents infiltrating Russia's 127th Motorized Rifle Division uncovered a complex and well-planned scheme. According to them, arms and ammunition trafficking has become a constant practice in the Zaporozhian sector.
The process is a bureaucratic one: company commanders, together with warehouse managers, remove modern weapons from the official inventory under the pretext that they were destroyed during clashes or lost on the battlefield. In reality, the equipment is handed over to middlemen who place it on the black market. “Russian armed forces traffic in weapons in the Zaporozhye sector”the representatives of the Atesh group emphasized in an official communication on the Telegram platform.
Officers' profit and privates' risks
At the heart of this scheme are recent models of assault rifles, such as the AK-12 and AK-102, which are among the best performing equipment of the Russian military today. These end up being sold illegally, while front-line troops instead receive AK-74 models, a weapon introduced as early as 1974. The difference in technology and the degree of wear and tear of the old weapons directly affects the defense capacity of the units.
“These weapons often jam or miss during combat. This directly reduces the combat effectiveness of units and leads to additional losses”members of the resistance group explain. The situation has generated a wave of discontent among the soldiers, who are aware that they are being sent into the fray with unsafe equipment so that their superiors can enrich themselves. According to the post published by Atesh, “while commanders make money by selling modern weapons, soldiers are sent into battle with weapons that can malfunction at any moment”.
