President of the russia-based arms company Kalashnikov Concern, Alan Lushnikov, announced that starting 2024, the russian army will be receiving AK-12 assault rifles, "updated" based on the experience of this weapon's application in Ukraine.
Lushnikov said in a TV interview that the concern has done "serious work" with the customer to define the relevant requirements for the updated assault rifles, which emerged due to the real combat issues experienced by russian soldiers wielding it on Ukrainian battlefields. According to the speaker, serial production of the updated rifles has already begun, and the first batches will be shipped in January 2024, he expects.
The AK-12 assault rifle, presented as an answer to the American M4, made its first public appearance as a prototype in 2011, then was officially demonstrated in 2012, and adopted in 2018, serial production starting the same year.
However, once russian forces started using it actively in spring 2022, multiple drawbacks of design surfaced. In particular, russian troops were complaining about the shortage of silencers for this rifle and incompatibility with custom ones, even forcing some special forces operators to give up on AK-12 and dust off old AKMS guns instead.
In response, Vladimir Lepin, General Director at Kalashnikov Concern, announced plans for further changes to design and ergonomics in July 2022. Basically, the rifle got "de-modernized," losing its main feature, the two-round burst fire mode.
By the end of 2022, Kalashnikov presented its updated AK-12 with a radical solution to the silencer problem, namely by making the muzzle brake unremovable. The final version of AK-12, known as the "2023 edition" or AK-12/23, was officially presented in May 2023. The company's representative was expecting a delivery of the first experimental batch of these to the army in the second half of 2023.