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With its independence in 1991, Ukraine inherited a huge and unneeded stockpile of arms and ordnance from its former Soviet masters. In the years since, the country’s businessmen, security services and cargo carriers, operating in an environment plagued by corruption, have repeatedly been accused of trafficking the surplus in black-market arms deals to Africa and the Middle East. So it was little surprise that this year, after fighting broke out, that Ukraine felt the sting of what had been its own shadowy trade. Exactly the sort of weapons it has long exported found bloody use on Ukrainian soil.

One result so far has been violence in eastern Ukraine that has claimed hundreds of lives and destroyed homes and infrastructure in areas that had not seen combat since World War II. The prevalence of Soviet-era military equipment used in the rebellion and crackdown was obvious from the semiautomatic pistols and assault rifles seen at rebel checkpoints to the glimpses of shoulder-fired, heat-seeking antiaircraft missiles, or Manpads, that were occasionally carried by rebels and apparently used to down several Ukrainian military aircraft, including one strike that killed more Ukrainian soldiers than any other incident in the war. A legacy of weapons from the Soviet period, the SA-11, or Buk surface-to-air missile, was also suspected in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, though the precise origins of that particular missile and the launch vehicle used in that attack are as yet unclear.

Today, At War will look at an element of the conflict that standard images or field reporting does not readily capture, because the details are too small to be seen at a glance, or cannot be viewed at all without magnification: the origins of small-arms ammunition.

Understanding the origins of small-arms ammunition, which usually attracts less attention than big-ticket or high-tech weapons, is important, because in most conflicts it is a primary fuel for organized violence, and accounts for a large share of the casualties and the disruption caused by armed parties. This was certainly the case in eastern Ukraine, where the war began as rebels seized territory with common and relatively simple rifles and other light weapons. This war, like many, gained velocity with small arms, and as the violence from small arms escalated, it grew into a conflict that claimed a civilian passenger jet and the lives of 298 people passing through overhead.

Samples of cartridge cases gathered by two reporters for The New York Times after a pair of intensive fights in early May on the outskirts of Slovyansk, a former rebel stronghold, showed that ammunition for assault rifles used in the clashes originated in plants that once were mainstays of Soviet arms production. These include cartridge factories in the Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic (now Kyrgyzstan) during the 1970s and ‘80s, and in Russia and Ukraine in the late-Soviet and early post-Soviet years.

What does this tell us? That Ukraine was the latest victim of the same arms-production and stockpiling excesses of the Soviet period, and may have been the victim of its own huge legacy caches.

The details here lie in history. During the Cold War, the territory of Ukraine was to be the Soviet Union’s second line of defense against a conventional Western attack, a buffer behind the Warsaw Pact countries. And during these same years, the Kremlin, still stung by the German invasion in 1941 and alarmed by the United States’ destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs in 1945, had remained on a war footing, channeling the industrial capacity of the Soviet Union’s planned economy to produce weapons in vast quantities.

In preparation for its role as Russia’s buffer, Ukraine became a repository for all manner of Soviet ordnance and military equipment. To Ukraine’s good fortune, this was a front that did not have to be. Then, bad luck intervened again. To the country’s already massive stockpile, more arms were added when the Soviet Army withdrew from Warsaw Pact countries after the Soviet collapse. As the forces slunk home eastward, they carried or shipped much of their ammunition and equipment with them, and dumped huge quantities of it in Ukraine, leaving extraordinarily large, undocumented ordnance caches.

The conditions were set for illicit arms transfers, or to fuel internal war.

At War’s Sample



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In this particular cartridge survey, the expended samples were gathered at the bridge connecting southwestern Slovyansk to the village of Andreyevka, and at an intersection and railroad crossing at Semyonovka, to the city’s east. It was not possible to determine which combatants had fired them, as the bridge and the railroad crossing had been occupied, at least briefly, by both sides shortly before the samples were collected. It is likely the sample contained cases expended by rebels and by government troops.

Almost all of the rounds were 5.45×39-millimeter rifle cartridges, the ammunition fired by the AK-74 line of assault rifles. Several were 7.62x54R, the more powerful ammunition used by both the PK machine gun and SVD sniper rifle families, both of which were used by government forces and rebels.

The primary focus here is on the first caliber. Many conflicts have their signature personal weapons, and in Ukraine, AK-74 variants were it — the weapon most commonly carried by combatants on both sides. This class of rifles, first distributed to Soviet forces in the 1970s, combined the design traits of the original Kalashnikov assault rifle with the concept of small-caliber, high-velocity ammunition fielded by the Pentagon’s M-16 line in Vietnam. The war in Ukraine offered an unusual example of both sides using AK-74 variants on a large scale.

Its presence also created moments of confusion in Internet discussions of the war. Perhaps because the cartridges for the AK-74 series are roughly similar in external dimensions to standard U.S. and NATO 5.56×45-millimeter ammunition, and do not resemble the familiar ammunition of the older and more widespread Kalashnikov line, some commentators declared that 5.45×39 rounds found in the fighting were NATO cartridges. They weren’t.

Our sample size is small. It totaled fewer than 80 cartridges. Fifty-nine of the cartridges were freshly expended, but two of them were intact rounds that were dropped in the fighting. The remainder were unused rounds I observed a rebel loading into AK-74 magazines at a rebel base. Interestingly, but not conclusively, the roughly 20 rounds observed in rebel possession were of identical provenance to expended rounds collected on the ground.

The small sample reflected the limits of field research in Slovyansk, where suspicion of Westerners runs high. Ammunition sampling in any case is often a dicey pursuit. Many combatants and their supporters find it suspicious. Some call it the handiwork of spies.

Nonetheless, with various commentators insisting that Russia was providing the rebels new military equipment (most notably on the false meme that Russia had provided the rebels RPG-30s) or that some of the combatants were using NATO cartridges, Noah Sneider and I wanted to take a slice of the small-arms ammunition and see if we could find anything intriguing or suggestive.

While working on other stories, we gathered the rounds casually, in places where the gunmen had at least briefly drifted away and left behind many spent cases. We pocketed our samples quickly and for a few hours we kept them out of view, until reaching the hotel at night, where I shut myself away, inventoried them, made a photo record of their markings and then bundled them up and discarded them in a communal garbage bin.

In each case, the point of manufacture and vintage of the ammunition was determined by examining headstamps — the markings at the base of a cartridge case imprinted by manufacturers.

We routinely collect this type of data while covering conflicts, and archive it to examine arms-transfer trends. When the data is aggregated or combined with shipping documents or packaging examinations (or shared with fellow arms researchers), we sometimes are able to make observations on a local or regional scale, to confirm retransfers of lawfully obtained ammunition to third parties, to identify the presence of unexpected ammunition in a conflict as part of an arms-transfer fraud, or to participate in multinational investigations that can point to a previously undocumented exporter of cartridges to zones of protracted conflict.

The photograph below, of headstamps on an expended 5.45×39 millimeter rifle cartridge, is an example of what stamped codes can reveal.

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This cartridge case was collected on the Andreyevka bridge. Note at the 12 o’clock position the stamped code 270. During the Cold War, that was the factory code assigned to the ammunition plant in Luhansk, Ukraine. The stamp at 6 o’clock — 77 — is a two-digit code indicating manufacturing year, 1977 in this case. This cartridge is roughly 37-years-old and it had not traveled far: Luhansk is fewer than 80 miles east of Slovyansk.

The city’s cartridge factory, now doing business as Lugansk Cartridge Works, was long part of the Soviet constellation of arms plants. And the date on the cartridge sample found on the bridge suggests one of the tasks its former Kremlin masters assigned it in the mid-1970s — to help the Soviet Union roll out a new service rifle. The AK-74 line had been accepted by the Soviet Army in 1974 (thus the two digits in its abbreviated name), and it required a supply of new cartridges for training and war reserves.

This headstamp pointed to what the overall sample would show. Every case found was from a Soviet or former Soviet plant, and many of them matched years when we would expect high production — either soon after the AK-74 rollout or during the Soviet Union’s long war in Afghanistan, when its ammunition expenditures would have been high.

Look at the display below.



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The factory codes correspond to arms plants that produced cartridges for Soviet forces.

The code 539, upper right, is from the Tula Cartridge Works plant south of Moscow. The code 3 indicates the plant in Ulyanovsk, the birthplace of Lenin, east of Moscow on the Volga River. The code 7 matches the plant in Amursk, in Russia’s Far East. And the code 60 was used by the cartridge plant in Frunze, in the Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic. (The city shed its Soviet name and became Bishkek, the Kyrgyz capital, when the Soviet Union fell apart.) The Cyrillic LPZ is a more recent stamp from Luhansk — it is an abbreviation for the Russian-language name for the successor firm at the plant.

Of the 54 rounds collected, only five appeared to have been manufactured after the Soviet collapse. All of these rounds bore stamps from Luhansk.

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The presence of the ammunition from multiple Soviet factories that were busily manufacturing standard ammunition for Soviet rifles in the late Soviet period aligns neatly with historical factors at play in Ukraine. Put simply, these rounds, along with the samples from Luhansk, carried the headstamps one would expect in Ukrainian military arsenals and in the unregistered stockpiles from the Soviet collapse. The provenance of the stamps also aligns with rebel claims that much of their ammunition was captured from dispirited government troops, or was purchased from corrupt local police or sympathetic military officers.

This, of course, will not settle any arguments, and it shouldn’t, given the small sample size. (We invite other researchers to gather and pool more data and see where it leads.) Some commentators might want to claim that the presence of cartridges manufactured on Russian soil suggests that a recent Kremlin hand was involved in funneling these rounds to the fighters, and thereby stoking eastern Ukraine’s violence. This sample certainly does not disprove that possibility, as similar cartridges would be expected to be found over the border in Russia, in neighboring countries, and in the pro-Russian enclave of Transnistria. The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project posted a video report earlier this month of a sting showing one possible way that arms have flowed into eastern Ukraine from Transnistria. And any smart arms pipeline to the rebels would match headstamps smuggled into Ukraine to those already in Ukrainian stockpiles.

Still, given Ukraine’s arms-trafficking circles, smuggling weapons into Ukraine might not be necessary. And a fuller read of Ukraine’s peculiar stockpiling history means that these cartridges cannot be pinned to any external foreign support by identification alone, and that local sources are more than plausible for much of what was fired at the edges of Slovyansk in May. If that was the case, Ukraine has been suffering from what its corrupt arms dealers once shipped. Its violence, tied to surplus arms far beyond what its military might ever need, and that might better have been destroyed long ago, is a reminder of the many excess stockpiles around the world, all of them latent firepower, waiting for their day.