Transporting a soldier with a broken leg is not an easy task: in order to ensure that the injured person’s condition does not deteriorate, it is worth putting the broken limb on a rail, and for this the Russian soldiers found the most suitable means on the front line covered with trees and debris:
an AK-74 assault rifle.
Суровая российская тактическая медицина https://t.co/cSBvsjrnE9
— Necro (Mancer) May 18, 2023
Although the fact that the unfortunate soldier’s leg was put in a rail with a supposedly functional firearm is problematic in itself, the Russian soldiers were able to add to the situation by the weapon was attached to the limb with the muzzle up, and the magazine was not removed.
The above two steps were probably taken to avoid exposing the weapon to unnecessary dirt, however it takes little explanation why fixing a broken leg in this way is not necessarily a good solution.
Although at this point we can no longer be sure of anything, it is likely that, during the treatment, a loaded, secured machine gun was not attached to the wounded (in modern assault rifles, the magazine can be inserted in such a way that ammunition does not enter the chamber), regardless of all this, two very prominent rules for the use of firearms are that there is no such thing as an empty gunand that it’s not really appropriate to point the muzzle at something you don’t intend to shoot, and the wounded soldier probably belongs to this category. While it is relatively difficult to die from a broken leg thanks to modern medicine, a shot to the liver can cause much more trouble.
The cover image is an illustration, showing two AK-74 assault rifles
