North Russian governor calls on local population to send hunting weapons to the front

According to Uiba, donated guns will help warriors fight Ukrainian drones. He especially has in mind shotguns that are believed to be efficient in destroying approaching enemy UAVs.

“At the moment there is an urgent issue to take use of civilian smoothbore weapons in order to combat unmanned aerial vehicles,” the governor writes on his Telegram channel.

“Our countrymen with dignity protect the borders of the motherland and courageously and wholeheartedly fight Nazism and the mercenaries of the collective West,” he adds.

Vladimir Uiba has from the start been a staunch supporter of the war of aggression against Ukraine and has repeatedly appeared in public with uniforms marked with the Nazi-inspired war symbol “Z,” as well as patches of the Wagner Group.

The Komi governor is not the first regional leader to call for donations of shotguns to the front. From before, authorities in the far eastern region of Buryatia have made similar pleas. Also several members of the State Duma, Russia’s lower chamber of parliament, have said that confiscated hunting weapons should be sent to warriors in Ukraine, the Russian version of the Barents Observer reports.

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The Komi Republic has lost several hundred men in the war. A count by Telegram channel Pesets by late May 2024 included more than 540 local Komi men killed on occupied land. The actual number is likely to be far higher.