Originally published at: Ukrainian MP injures own party members
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A local councillor is not a member of parliament.
EDIT: I see that the New Voice of Ukraine made that mistake.
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O_O Anyone translate what was said? The fact he didn’t run or anything makes me think he was there to just kill himself and take everyone else with him. 
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Those weren’t grenades of the sort we normally think of; one of those would have killed anyone within the camera’s field of view. Maybe they were training grenades, which look like regular live grenades, but have a much lower charge and no shrapnel. Still powerful enough to cause numerous injuries, though.
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I dunno, I’ve seen hand grenade explosions and they are fairly underwhelming compared to the movies. I’ve seen Iraq footage where a SAW gunner had 2 of them explode by him in a doorway, and despite taking shrapnel, he not only lived but was still up and fighting.
They looked fairly destructive from what I saw. The article said 26 wounded, 6 of them gravely (which may or may not end up in death later on), sounds plausible to me.
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Yeah, perhaps but all the live grenades I’ve thrown made me think that movies were drastically underselling them. I could chuck one at least 20-30 yards and could still feel the concussive force behind the blast bunker wall. Grenades are really designed for this sort of close-quarters bunker clearing (ie indiscriminate killing of all present in an enclosed space). On the other hand, even the training grenades could easily deafen someone or cause serious burns. And then, of course there are the “flash-bang” grenades that are supposed to be sub-lethal but routinely kill and maim people.
Point is, there are just too damn many ways humans have devised to kill. And they too often end up in the hands of assholes like this.
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The military makes a distinction between defensive and offensive grenades.
Contrary to what you might think from the name, an offensive grenade is generally less lethal: it’s an explosive device whose impact comes from the concussive force of the explosion. As it was explained to me, you use offensive grenades if you’re attacking an enemy position: they are designed to stun or disorient (and sometimes kill) enemy soldiers, but not do too much harm to any of your own soldiers if they happen to get caught in the blast radius. The ‘flash bangs’ used in police actions are a scaled-down version of offensive grenades; they’re optimized for the stunning and disorienting effect, but intended not to be lethal (aside from a certain regrettable tendency to set fire to stuff).
The canonical grenade that most people picture when someone says ‘grenade’ – the classic ‘pineapple’ shape – is a fragmentation grenade, which is a defensive grenade. They have a steel casing that is pre-stressed/pre-cut so that when it explodes, it disintegrates into chunks (fragmentation) that fly out and kill people. You use them when you and all your friends are behind cover, and the enemy is not.
I don’t know what kind this gentleman used, but they might have been offensive rather than defensive grenades, so that the people injured wouldn’t have been shredded by chunks of fast-moving metal. That could explain the relatively low casualty count. Of course, if you throw an offensive grenade in a confined space, the blast alone will do serious damage to anyone nearby, not to mention turning anything loose or fragile into shrapnel that can inflict horrifying injuries.
(Another hazard is that while an offensive grenade might have a plastic or cardboard casing, it can have metal parts. An instructor told me he’d seen a woman killed by a type of offensive grenade that had a metal baseplate that was supposed to be removed before use; the person throwing it didn’t know to remove that part, and the woman – a bystander – was hit and killed by it).
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I never came across that distinction in all my years. Many different types including explosive, smoke, fragmentation, WP, CS, thermite but never heard offensive vs defensive. If it is a true distinction it isn’t common usage.
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As reported by Ukrainian site TSN:
It is also reported that he left a suicide note at home. However, he is being treated in intensive care, and apparently doctors are optimistic that nobody will have died from this attack.
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Clearly a “responsible grenade owner”.
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The only way to stop a bad guy with a grenade is a good guy with a grenade.
/s
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Thanks for the info. I wonder what the note said.
Ditto, but I guess I could see someone explaining the different types being used in different situations.
Even before the war, it is surprising how many videos there are of Russians and other Eastern Europeans fucking around with grenades. I suspect due to the corruption in the military, if some one sells a crate on the black market, and they notice it missing, someone just marks it off as used in training. Whereas if a crate went missing in the US they would lock a base down and look for it. That and there have been armed conflicts there in the last 20-30 years so there is bound to be ordinance floating around still.
A couple years ago I went out to shoot some clay pigeons with a guy from my dad’s church, and old farmer, and one of his friends. The friend was an armorer in the Army during Korea and said there was a guy training who froze up during grenade training. He pulled the pin and just held the throw pose. The spoon was still depressed, but he wouldn’t move or throw it for about a half hour before they finally talked him into it. Scary stuff.
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