GP-25

Russia’s workhorse 40mm under-barrel grenade launcher — a single-shot, muzzle-loaded, caseless weapon that rides beneath AK-pattern rifles and has seen every major Soviet and Russian war since Afghanistan.

Overview

The GP-25 “Kostyor” (Bonfire) is a single-shot, under-barrel grenade launcher designed to clamp directly onto the standard-issue AKM and AK-74 assault rifles. It fires a unique family of 40mm caseless ammunition — the propellant charge is integral to the grenade, so there is no spent case to eject — and gives the infantry squad organic high-explosive fire without a dedicated grenadier weapon. Alongside its evolved variants, the GP-30 and GP-34, the GP-25 remains the standard Russian under-barrel launcher and has been widely proliferated across post-Soviet and Soviet-legacy forces.

Development

The Soviet Union had experimented with rifle-launched grenades throughout the 1960s, but those systems were slow to reload and degraded the host weapon’s accuracy. Work on a dedicated under-barrel launcher began at the KBP Instrument Design Bureau in the early 1970s, and the result — the GP-25 — was formally accepted into service in 1978. It was first photographed in the West during the early years of the Soviet-Afghan War, in 1984, when it appeared mounted on the AK-74 rifles of Soviet airborne troops. According to both Wikipedia and HandWiki, the appearance confirmed that the Red Army had replaced its rifle-grenade capability with a purpose-built, rapid-firing attachment.

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