Russia officially postponed the development of a new self-guided ammunition or ‘smart bullet’, according to Lenta.ru newspaper reports.

A self-guided ammunition or smart bullet is a bullet that is able to correct the trajectory, changed speed in order to snipers be able to engage targets faster, and with better accuracy. 

The report, which was released on 9 December, said that development of new generation of Russian self-guided ammunition for sniper rifles had been postponed indefinitely owing to technological reasons.

“Russian engineers have postponed the development of domestic self-guided bullets for an indefinite period,” said Lenta.ru.

Meanwhile, the TASS Russian News Agency in 2016 reported that Russia’s Advanced Research Foundation, or ARF, has started testing of a ‘smart bullet’.

“The work in this direction continues. The stages of the product’s design and experimental development in an unguided regime have been completed, and the guided flight tests have started,” ARF deputy director General Vitaly Davydov stated TASS in an interview.

The following year, Sergei Abramov, director of the Rostec cluster of conventional weapons, ammunition and special chemistry, stated that the joint laboratory of the ARF and the Central Scientific Research Institute of Precision Engineering (TsNIITOCHMASH) was engaged in developing ‘smart bullets’. It was planned that the experimental samples will be produced in the 2020s.