Imagine if you could make your weapon half the size while doubling its max effective range. This is the promise of a bullpup rifle design. The Malyuk’s development story perfectly tracks the history of Ukraines small arms industry and how it turned itself around from a state of disrepair after the fall of the soviet union. The creators even say that its recoil is reduced by 50% compared to the AK. This rifle is used by Ukraines most elite special forces as well as its most controversial Azov Battalion. In fact it’s so synonymous with being idenginous to Ukraine that early in the war we saw Russian double agents were captured carrying the Malyuk rifles. They were trying to be disguised to look like Ukrainian Special operators.
Source Article:
https://megaprojects.net/weapons/malyuk-ukraines-mystery-rifle/#_ftn10
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So are the claims about this mysterious weapon accurate? What’s the best way to use the Malyuk bullpup in combat? And why did the Ukrainian military industrial complex originally create it?
The origin of the system comes from a Ukrainian program in the mid 1990s. Mega Projects . net George Colclough wrote a great article outlining the lackluster condition that Ukraines small arms manufacturing was in following the collapse of the soviet union. You see Ukraine was responsible for 30% of all defense production and 40% of all research and development for the Soviet Union but it was mostly focused on building intercontinental ballistic missiles , tanks and aircraft carriers not small arms. Russia had the large Tula arms plant famous for creating millions of rifles and ammo each year.
The newly independent Ukraine in the early 1990’s had inherited bits and pieces of a small arms industry. They only had small fragments of a complete manufacturing apparatus. Ukraine would now have to successfully coordinate between the 15 different federalized republics where the now privatized small arms plants were located. George Colcough outlines how in 1996 many of these privatized weapons companies were brought under state control when they formed the Ukrspetsexport which was a major part of Ukraines military industrial complex. In the early 2000’s Ukraine turned to this conglomerate for an answer to modernizing their old soviet AK stockpile. The Malyuk is one of those attempts.
The first major Ukranian small arms program was called “vepr. A few prototypes were built from existing soviet era rifles like the RPK, the AKM, AK-74, and even the SKS. The Ukrainian government wanted to refresh their line of left-over soviet AK rifles that were in their inventory using old parts combined with new popular looks like polymer cased rifles.
This obscure 2015 article of Ukrainian defense review has an interview with the vice CEO Serhiy Luhovskoy, who is responsible for creating the rifle. In it he claims the Malyuk has its recoil reduced by 50% compared to the AK, a claim we will further investigate in just a minute.
Serhiy goes on to explain that the Malyuk was originally created as a private venture when the Ukrainian Secret Service SBU requested it.
Malyuk is a Russian & Ukrainian word which directly translates to “ baby boy” which was coincidentally also my squad's nickname for me in Iraq. It was only meant to be a temporary name for the prototype but the name ended up sticking. But You’ll often see the weapon called the Vulcan.
It’s designed and marketed by a private Ukrainian company called IPI. (InterProInvest) located in Kyiv. They’ve been around since 1998 and they’ve grown into somewhat of a big player in the Ukrainian military industrial complex. Interprovest creates not just small arms but fire control systems for tanks and radar systems detect the location of enemy drones.
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