Russian Conscripts Given Guns From 1800s To Fight In Ukraine: Report

Military conscripts from the Russian-backed Donbas region were sent to the frontlines armed only with weapons developed in the late 19th century.

Several Russian draftees were issued with a bolt action Mosin rifle, a weapon that was produced in the 1880s by the Russian Empire. The weapon went out of production decades ago after World War II, three people who saw the conscripts bearing the rifles told Reuters.

“It's like we're fighting with World War II muskets,” one of the Donbas conscripts, a student, said.

The student noted that they were not given instructions on how to fire the rifle. Some were also given a dangerous mission of drawing Ukrainian troops to fire onto themselves so that other conscripts could identify the enemy’s position and bomb them.

A clip shared on Twitter and in pro-Ukraine Telegram channels also shows a group of ten soldiers wearing oversized helmets and armed with Mosin rifles complaining that they were being “thrown into the s**t.”

“Know the truth! The Russian Ministry of Defence has no idea about us, or what we’re doing here,” one conscript said.

“Our rifles are from the 1940s! They don’t f***ing fire! They’re sending f***ing ordinary students into war,” another conscript was recorded as saying.

A group of 135 Donbas conscripts in the besieged city of Mariupol have reportedly refused to fight by laying down their arms, a partner of a conscript told Reuters. The men were brought and kept in a basement by their military commanders as punishment but were later released.

Mosin rifles were one of the most widely used weapons in World War II. It was also considered the predecessor of the AK-47 rifle. The weapons were first developed by Sergei Ivanovich Mosin, a Czarist Army soldier and engineer and were first adopted by the Russian army in 1891.

The Russians stopped using the Mosin at the end of World War II and started the adoption of the AK-47 in 1947. The Soviets later exported large numbers of the Mosin riles to socialist movements around the world, including soldiers for the Korean People’s Army during the Korean War and the Viet Minh during the war in French Indochina.