If the increase in financial support for soldiers and officers is implemented, how much will we as volunteers be able to reduce our support for the front specifically in the area of equipping the best sniper teams? We have certain statistics, because there are different levels of material support both for snipers and for the soldiers who fight alongside them, and the overall picture that emerges is a contradictory one. First, the GUR recently went through a pay reform and the real funds that fighters and officers receive are half of what they had during Budanov's time. So behind all sorts of good intentions there can be enormous failures that are difficult to explain rationally during wartime. The fact that this increase is being introduced through a Cabinet of Ministers resolution as an experiment, the fact that it is being funded from money saved by the Ministry of Defense itself, the fact that it will be regulated through commanders' orders — all of this means that very oft...
Four long years of experience: how sniper warfare — and our support for snipers — has changed. In just one more month, the great russian-Ukrainian war will have lasted as long as the First World War. It was in the furnace of World War I that mass professional sniping was born. During the Russian-Ukrainian war, sniper warfare has undergone its greatest transformation yet — and these changes must be understood again and again. These days also mark four years since we began helping snipers. By then I could no longer fight myself, and countless requests from the front forced me to begin the work of providing grassroots support to units close to my heart. During the first months, starting in May 2022, we helped with ammunition, vehicles, rifles, optics, suppressors — we provided whatever the guys asked for. But even at that early stage, we began concentrating on .338 caliber rifles, mainly Rugers and Savages as affordable but high-quality weapons. We refined every rifle to near perfection,...