Ukrainian Barrett

The Donbas war has revealed enormous problems in the Armed Forces with sniper weapons. In fact, the only Soviet-era rifle was in service - the Sniper Rifle Dragunov (SVD), which was outdated morally and physically.

After the war went into the positional stage, the enemy relied on sniper war and sabotage groups, so our troops were forced to react. Due to the fact that there were no domestic samples as of 2015, there were purchases of Western-made weapons primarily in the civilian market, because Western partners actually imposed an arms embargo. First of all, small batches of 12.7x99mm (.50BMG) Barrett rifles were purchased.




Subsequently, the first domestic developments under the main large-caliber cartridge - the Soviet 12.7x108 mm - appeared.

In fact, the first such model developed from scratch was the XADO Snipex M75 sniper rifle from the Kharkiv company XADO Chemical group. It is unknown where this development came from, because before that the company was mainly engaged in the development and production of various automotive and industrial chemicals.

For the first time the rifle was presented at the international specialized exhibition "Weapons and Security - 2016", which took place from October 11 to October 14, 2016 in Kiev.

This rifle is positioned by the developer as a high-precision high-precision sniper weapon for firing at distances of 100 to 2500 meters. The designers actually used a sufficiently successful solution of Soviet designers 80 years ago, implemented in the anti-tank gun Degtyarev PTRD sample 1941, thus obtaining a single-shot weapon with manual loading of the cartridge in the barrel, automatically unlocking the bolt and firing after firing.

The rifle barrel is movable, has the ability to roll back in the receiver when firing by 25 millimeters, which allows to reduce the peak recoil force that affects the shooter when fired. However, potentially such a solution impairs the accuracy of the shooting.

The rifle comes with a massive muzzle brake and a folding bipod. The XADO Snipex M75 has a Pikatini rail with vertical adjustment of the angle of installation in the range from 0 to 70 mils in 10 mil increments, which theoretically allows the use of sights with a limited stock of vertical corrections for shooting at distances up to 3000 meters.

In parallel with the military variant, the Kharkov company offers on the market a civil version - XADO Snipex "Rhino Hunter" under the cartridge 12.7x99mm (.50BMG). The only external difference is a regular Picatinny rail on the receiver.

Although the XADO Chemical group has stated that such samples are actually manufactured, there is no information on the military's interest in arming today. However, after the purchase of a large party of American "Barrett" and the emergence of DSKM-TC, this rifle is unlikely to have been adopted by the Armed Forces.