It is little known that Bulgaria once operated a significant fleet of reconnaisance aircraft that at one point even included a number of MiG-25RBT 'Foxbats'. Bulgaria was the only Warsaw Pact country to operate the mighty Foxbat, the highly specialised nature of which and prohibitive operating costs were apparently enough to dissuade all other Warsaw Pact members from acquiring the aircraft. Bulgaria itself would only purchase four MiG-25s, which likely did little to improve the operations and maintenance costs per unit while they were in operational service.

The following list attempts to keep track of military equipment delivered or pledged to Ukraine by Lithuania shortly prior to and during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. The entries below are sorted by armament category (with a flag denoting the country of origin), and due to the confidential nature of some arms deliveries they can serve only as a lower bound to the total volume of weaponry delivered. This list will be updated as further military support is declared or uncovered.

 

As much of Western Europe appears to have finally woken up to the necessity of concrete military power for security, the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania already realised the requirement to prepare themselves to deal with Russian aggression in the Baltic region since Russia's annexation of Crimea in early 2014. Correspondingly, each country has since drastically expanded the size and readiness of its armed forces. Whilst initially mostly purchasing small arms, ATGMs and MANPADS to equip active and reserve forces, further investments have meanwhile paved the way for the acquisition of air defence and anti-ship missile systems, long-range artillery and hundreds of AFVs.

By Stijn Mitzer and Joost Oliemans

Transnistria, officially known as the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic (PMR), has churned out a number of highly interesting armoured fighting vehicle (AFV) designs over the past decade. Unable to replace its dated inventory of Soviet weaponry ever since proclaiming independence in the early 1990s, the country has instead sought to supplement its vehicle park with a number of homegrown vehicle designs. Many of these are based on already existing AFVs, which are then modified to suit an entirely new role. Arguably the best examples of this are the MT-LB SPAAG and the BTRG-127 'Bumblebee' APC, the latter of which originally started its career as the GMZ-3 minelayer vehicle. [1]