laststandonzombieisland

The Ukrainian Army is working on uniforms for their Presidential Regiment, a reinforced company/light battalion-sized force detailed with ceremonial guard of honor duties with a secondary detail as public order troops in the capital area.

Not wanting to rely on past Russian/Soviet uniforms, influences and weapons for obvious reasons (their current service uniforms already look more like NATO’s than Moscow’s anyway), the uniform proposals blend a lot of different things from the country’s past including gear worn by the army of the old Kievan Rus and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania; various Don and Kuban Cossacks of different periods; the Russian Civil War-era rule of Hetman of the Ukraine Pavlo Skoropadsky; the armed forces of the Ukrainian People’s Republic; and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army of WWII and the 1950s.

One such dress uniform drawn from this buffet of military history is the proposal below.

 

If you note carefully, the rifle for the unit is the M1895 Steyr, an 8x56Rmm bolt gun with an enbloc clip magazine used by the Royal and Imperial Austro-Hungarian Army in WWI and the Germans in WWII.

It makes a lot of sense as the Tsar’s Army (which included millions of Ukrainians) captured hundreds of thousands of M95s in the early part of the war and reissued them to the Empire’s troops. The Austrians also provided a few trainloads of the rifles to Skoropadskyi’s troops and Hetman Pyotr Krasnov’s Don Cossacks in 1918 to use against the Reds, and the Germans did the same for various Ukrainian and Cossack irregulars in WWII.

In a way, the Austrian rifle is more “Ukrainian” than the Mosin-Nagant if you think about it.

And if you told me that somewhere along the Don a warehouse exists that is still full of M95s still in arsenal condition waiting to be issued, I would not be the least surprised.