Ukrainian Border Guard Service Finds World War I Weapons Cache

A border patrol found a cache of the World War I-era weapons near the border with Poland.

This was reported by the Western Regional Directorate of the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine on its Facebook page.

The cache of weapons was discovered by servicemen while patrolling the Ukrainian-Polish border section.

“While patrolling the Ukrainian-Polish section of the border, servicemen of the Stuzhytsia department of the Chop detachment discovered a cache of firearms from the First World War behind the line of engineering structures. The border guards noticed the details of the rifle, which were visible from the ground,” the service said.

After the cache was discovered, police and the State Emergency Service (SESU) were called to the scene. They seized about 4,500 rounds of 7.62mm ammunition, 3 hand grenades, and 75 Mosin rifles.

Unfortunately, the rifles were in poor condition, and didn’t hold any museum value. The found ammunition, according to the SESU, was disposed of through controlled detonation.

The findings allow us to establish the time of the cache’s creation quite accurately. Thus, the pointed shape of the bullets sets the lower boundary at 1908, when a pointed bullet of 7.62x54mm was created to replace the outdated blunt-nosed bullet.

At the same time, the grenades were identified as Lishin grenades. This was the first percussion grenade in the Russian Empire’s army. It was invented in 1904 and used during the Russo-Japanese War and World War I.

It was never officially adopted, but was instead handcrafted by the army and referenced in guidelines of that period. The design was relatively primitive and dangerous, using pyroxylene, an explosive significantly weaker than TNT. As a result, the grenade was quickly discontinued.

Due to these two findings, we can date the cache with a high degree of confidence to the period of World War I.

Despite the time that has passed since the First and Second World Wars, findings from that time continue to surface regularly even today.

As a reminder, in June 2021, the remains of a He 111 aircraft were found near the town of Brody.