KUPIANSK, Ukraine—In an old garage workshop outside Kupiansk, a unit of soldiers is turning to the past in their search for weapons to fight off Russian soldiers. One inventive unit is modernizing old Soviet-era KS 19 anti-aircraft guns and turning the antiquated machines into fast-moving weapons of destruction that can be used to target dozens of Russian soldiers at a time. With an ingenious act of improvisation and some commercially available tech, they are turning the Kremlin’s history against the Russian army.
The Soviet Union was once a major exporter of tanks, artillery, air defense systems, and armored personnel carriers throughout the world, but particularly Eastern Europe, including Ukraine. For decades, Ukraine had a supply of weapons left over from the communist era that were used both in Russia’s 2014 invasion of the Donbas region and at the beginning of the full-scale war that began on Feb. 24, 2022. As Russia launched attacks from all sides, soldiers and civilian fighters took up arms in any way they could, including with weapons made by their invading force.
Over time, the Kremlin’s relics were replaced as new Western weapons like Leopard Tanks, American M777s, and High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems were introduced to the front lines. Ukraine has received $100 billion in military aid over the last 21 months of war, and has managed to ward off masses of Russian forces. In areas like Lviv and Kyiv, life has returned to something resembling normal as the two-year mark of the war approaches.
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While Western support has remained steadfast throughout, on Nov. 16, U.S. President Joe Biden signed a temporary spending bill into law to halt a government shutdown, and no new aid to Ukraine was listed in the bill. Further assistance to the war-torn country is at a standstill, and the soonest Congress could complete negotiations and deliver new aid to Ukraine is expected to be in mid-December, but might be even later, causing fears that aid from one of Ukraine’s largest supporters might be decreasing.
The uncertainty surrounding the future role of Western aid led Sergeant Evegeny Iitvin and the Artillery Battery Unit in the 241st brigade of Ukraine’s military to turn to Soviet-era weapons. Last March, they were given four KS-19 anti-aircraft guns, weapons made shortly after the end of the World War II. Similar weapons were used in the Korean War and America’s wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan.
The guns were made to be used against targets traveling at up to 745 mph at a distance of up to nine miles. The Ukrainian forces began to experiment with using these anti-aircraft guns in ground combat against Russian soldiers—to devastating effect.
In Kupiansk, the Artillery Battery mounted the guns on the back of civilian trucks, allowing them to be driven at speed into and out of a combat zone.
With the help of donors including the Ukrainian Okwine alcohol company, friends, and colleagues, the unit is funding the restoration of several guns, disassembling the weapons, loading the pieces on to the bed of a freight truck, and rebuilding them on the platform. After three months’ work, the result is a mobile weapon of destruction that can take out targets up to 328 feet wide, and whose exploding shells release thousands of small pieces of shrapnel, meaning it can wound and even kill dozens of Russian soldiers at a time.
In the garage where his team is remodeling the weapons, Iitvin told The Daily Beast, “If Biden provided weapons, I would not need these guns.”
Iitvin has also begun to modernize the weapons and make them easier to use, equipping the machines with $8,000 of iPad-like off-the-shelf tablets that he and his men bought with their own money. Paired with a drone and operator, the tablet can track Russian military movement and navigate attacks. Speaking of the improvised tracking system, Iitvin said, “It’s very simple. It’s like a box with two antennas; you just put it on the gun, you put two antennas on the barrel, one on the edge of the barrel and the other on another side. And it gives it all by itself.”
The remodeling of the guns also included trips to nearby European countries like the Czech Republic, where Iitvin acquired four Tatra freight trucks to transport the guns on the front lines. The trucks cost $80,000 each, he said, money that was raised with the help of friends and donors. They resprayed the vehicles in camo colors themselves.
“First came the old guns, which are not maneuverable and which no one wants to work with much. I called a friend and said let’s raise the money and do it (buy trucks),” said Iitvin.
“I’ve already fought on the front line. I already had the guns. I already understood their effectiveness, their safety, and that everything can be better and more convenient. I came up with the idea that I should put the gun on the truck. We brought, renovated, and installed it,” he added.
While Soviet-era weapons have been used by units throughout Ukraine, Iitvin believes that he is the first to think of placing the heavy KS 19 guns on trucks. The work, for the most part, has been done without money from the government, which at present cannot afford to allocate tens of thousands of dollars to specific units for military projects, the sergeant said.
Throughout Ukraine’s front lines, soldiers lack critical supplies. While Kyiv has set a 2024 budget for the military at $42 billion, this is at a time when much of the country is fighting Russian forces.
Nowhere is this more true than in Kupiansk. This city, 73 miles from Kharkiv, was one of the first to surrender to Russian troops after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. For more than six months, it remained under Russian occupation. Ukraine liberated the city in September 2022, as part of a rapid counteroffensive.
But the city, which occupies both banks of the Oskil river, is now at a standstill. In Kupiansk, The Daily Beast saw that Russian soldiers had destroyed the bridge that once connected the two sides, and advanced on the city. Police have been evacuating civilians from the east side of the city for days, bringing them to the west, which, for the time being, is safer, despite constant attacks.
Near the artillery battery’s front-line position six miles from the nearest enemy units, a soldier named Iusii told The Daily Beast that the situation in Kupiansk is “kind of tense, but we are holding them back, we don’t let them pass. When they storm and assault, we are given targets right away. We immediately hit the human force.”
Iusii lights a cigarette as he speaks, while behind him, Iitvin tends to his car, which had just overheated on its way to show The Daily Beast one of the guns in action. Like many of Ukraine’s brigades, Iitvin was gifted his car by volunteers who work to provide the military with vehicles. They are often damaged, and destroyed so frequently that supplies are dwindling.
Before overheating, the car had driven down a narrow potholed dirt road, to a place where five soldiers in disposable raincoats stood guard around the old Soviet weapon, machine guns in hand.
This gun had just been in use for three days in various locations, and Iitvin said it had, “already destroyed 1,000 (Russian soldiers). The idea is to hit from the first shot. But we need three times to shoot it. A 50-meter miss counts as a shot for these projectiles. It has a radius of less than 100 meters.”
“Today it is especially beautiful,” he added, looking at the clear skies that had covered Ukraine as the sun began to set at 3 p.m. The gun takes six minutes to load and shoot, and once it is fired, the blast pushes those standing nearby back a few inches, and the sudden boom of the cannon rings through the cold autumn air as nightfall reaches Ukraine. After the gun has been fired, Iitvin grabs the empty shell and puts it in the trunk of his car to bring back to the workshop.
At the garage, Iitvin said that he is aware that Russians, too, are using Soviet relics in their fight to gain control of Ukraine. The difference between the two fighting sides, the sergeant said, is that Russia’s military has not progressed past the USSR, where each military move had to go through a chain of bureaucratic permission and approval, while Ukraine’s military acts based on the situations as they arise without waiting for the situation to play out. They hope their ingenuity can save them.
“We are now a generation that is releasing us from Russian influence,” said Iitvin. “This is very important for our future, for the future of our children, because Russians are a backward race. They die for Putin. Putin is a tsar. And we’re free people. We’re fighting for freedom. To be free from them. This is my philosophy.”
