Meet Ukraine’s Homemade Assault Rifle that Refuses to Cough Under Fire

The FLARM F4 is a small arms answer to a large problem. It is not poetry. It is work. And in this war, work wins.

FLARM

When the Russians rolled in, Ukraine’s small arms market stopped being a curiosity and became a frontline necessity.

Ukraine didn’t have a free-for-all of gun ownership like the US. Civilian ownership was governed not by a single parliamentary statute but by Ministry of Internal Affairs regulation (Order No.622), which made possession a “may-issue” privilege, not a universal right.

Non-automatic rifles and shotguns were permitted for hunters, sport shooters and collectors if you passed background checks, medical checks, safety training and met age requirements.

Handguns were tightly restricted; generally allowed only for target shooting or in rare concealed-carry cases where a proven threat to life existed. Licenses had to be renewed, and owners had storage and reporting obligations.

Practical requirements included age floors, clean criminal records, no history of domestic violence or mental-health restrictions, and a legitimate reason such as sport or hunting.

The system gave police broad discretion in issuing permits. Estimates before the 2022 invasion put lawful civilian holdings in the low millions (the Ministry of Internal Affairs cited roughly 1.3 million lawful firearms in 2021), with higher figures when illicit weapons are included.

Then came February 2022. The government both debated loosening rules and, in practice, rapidly armed territorial defenders as invasion loomed and then began.

Under martial law, many weapons were distributed to civilians for territorial defense and possession was temporarily legalized for the duration, with the expectation those arms would be declared or returned after martial law ends.

That emergency shift was exceptional, not a change to the peacetime regulatory baseline.

I couldn’t locate a reliable public figure for the exact size of Ukraine’s small-arms manufacturing market before 2022 (for example, annual domestic output of rifles/SMGs or value in USD). Most sources discuss Ukraine’s arms industry in broader terms (ammunition, aircraft, drones) rather than small arms specifically.

According to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), by 2024 Ukraine had about 500 arms-producers, employing nearly 300,000 people. But this covers the overall defense industry, not the civilian market alone.

Reports indicate that before the full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine’s defense industry was much smaller and less oriented toward mass domestic manufacture of advanced weapons.

One note: a Ukrainian defense industry body told Business Insider that capacity has grown “35 times” since 2022, from roughly US $1 billion in 2022 to apparently much higher now, but this refers to overall arms production capacity, not specifically small arms.

Why the exact number is missing

Small arms manufacturing is often dispersed, especially in Ukraine (state-owned enterprises + private companies + licensed production); tracking all output is hard.

Many small-arms makers may serve both civilian and military markets (or switch roles in wartime), so separating purely military small-arms output is difficult.

Much of the publicly-available data focuses on major weapons systems (artillery, drones, missiles) rather than pistols, rifles, carbines.

Wartime conditions have rapidly changed the industry, meaning pre-2022 data may not have been updated or was treated as less strategic.

My best estimate

Given the available data, if Ukraine’s overall defense industry output capacity was about US $1 billion in 2022 (as the business-insider article suggests) and small arms represent a relatively small subset of total defense output, it’s plausible that the small arms manufacturing market might have been in the tens to low hundreds of millions of US dollars annually prior to 2022, rather than billions. But I must stress this is an informed estimate, not a documented figure.

Out of that pressure cooker came the FLARM F4, a 5.56 rifle born for civilians in 2022 that, in true wartime fashion, found a harder job to do. Today you’ll see it slung across infantry, praised by air assault snipers, and whispered about in workshops.