Artsrun Hovhannisyan, the press secretary of the Ministry of Defence of Armenia, has published on his social media pages a post announcing about a contract signed between the Kalashnikov Concern and an Armenian company called Royalsys Engineering Ltd concerning the licensed manufacturing of AK-12 and AK-15 rifles in Armenia.

The contract was signed during the International Military-Technical Forum ARMY-2018 which was recently held in Russia. It was signed by Davit Galstyan, CEO of Royalsys Engineering Ltd., and Andrey Barishnikov, Deputy CEO of Kalashnikov Concern. Davit Tonoyan, the Defence Minister of Armenia, was also present at the event.

So far, there is no information concerning the details of the contract. It is unclear whether the plant will be merely an assembly line or a full-scale production facility. It is also unknown if the new plant will produce the mentioned rifles for the Armenian Armed Forces’ needs only or it will also be an outsourcing platform for the Kalashnikov Concern. We’ll be following the developments around this contract and will report the news to our readers.

AK-12 and AK-15 rifles are the latest models in the world-famous AK family of rifles. The two models are basically identical with the exception of being chambered in different calibers. The AK-12 rifle is chambered in 5.45x39mm whereas the AK-15 is a 7.62x39mm rifle. Currently, Armenian Armed Forces use both of the mentioned cartridges. These rifles also have many other design improvements over the previous Kalashnikov rifle models such as the ergonomic grip, free-floated barrel, collapsible and folding stock, Picatinny rails on the top cover with a new and more rigid top cover fixation mechanism, new muzzle device etc. Both the AK-12 and AK-15 rifles have successfully passed extensive military testing and have been recently adopted by the Armed Forces of Russian Federation.

Images from: www.kalashnikov.media , www.facebook.com/arcrun