Ukraine Soldier’s Rifle Jams Mid-Firefight in Intense Trench Combat Video

Footage circulating online appears to show a Ukrainian fighter clearing a jammed gun during a firefight with Russian forces in eastern Ukraine.

The video clip, which has emerged on social media, shows the first-person perspective of what looks to be a Ukrainian soldier in a trench, struggling to use his firearm before successfully unjamming his rifle and returning fire at an out-of-shot enemy. Newsweek couldn’t independently verify this footage, and the Ukrainian General Staff has been approached for comment via email.

The video may have been filmed around the Ukrainian city of Kreminna, which was captured by Russian forces in the eastern Donbas region, encompassing Ukraine’s annexed Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts, in April 2022.

Ukraine’s counteroffensive, which has slowly been pushing back at Russian control in southern and eastern Ukraine since early June, has largely focused on the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions. But fighting has continued on the front line in Luhansk, sweeping down from Kupyansk to the border with the Donetsk region. Kreminna lies east of the current front lines in eastern Ukraine, around 14 miles from the constantly adjusting front on the western edge of Luhansk.

Captain Ilya Yevlash, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s eastern grouping of forces, said on Sunday that Russia’s 25th Combined Arms Army had taken up positions near Kreminna, and now numbered 17,000 personnel. Ukraine’s spy chief, Major General Kyrylo Budanov, said earlier this month that the 25th Combined Arms Army had around 15,000 men filling its newly created ranks.

The 25th Combined Arms Army was deployed to Kreminna to hold the line, rather than conduct offensive actions, the spokesperson said, in remarks reported by Ukrainian media. The Combined Arms Army is “deployed piecemeal” along the hotspots of fighting in eastern Ukraine to “reinforce the over-stretched line,” the U.K. defense ministry said in an intelligence update posted to social media on September 27.

With the units of the 25th Combined Arms Army scattered across the frontline, Russia is unlikely to be able to launch a coherent new offensive in the next few weeks, the U.K. government added last week.

Although concrete information around the capabilities of the 25th Combined Arms Army is murky, it is likely “severely understaffed” or poorly trained, much like Russian units mobilized against Ukraine’s previous counteroffensive in the fall of 2022, the U.S. defense think tank, the Institute for the Study of War, said on September 1.

In mid-September, the British defense ministry said soldiers from the 25th Combined Arms Army were likely in Ukraine for the first time, concentrated in the Luhansk region.

The new units had probably “been rushed into action early,” the U.K. government said on September 13. The units began moving into Ukraine in late August, according to Western intelligence, which is months ahead of the December 2023 deployment thought to have been originally planned.