According to the March 5 U.K. Defense Ministry's intelligence update, Russian soldiers are forced into hand-and-hand combat due to lack of ammunition. The reservists were thus ordered by the Russian Command to assault a Ukrainian concrete strong point with only “firearms and shovels.” “The lethality of the standard-issue MPL-50 entrenching tool is particularly mythologized in Russia. Little changed since it was designed in 1869, its continued use as a weapon highlights the brutal and low-tech fighting which has come to characterize much of the war,” the report states. The U.K. Defense Ministry also commented that one of the reservists described...
