Zastava Arms built roughly 4,000,000 M70-family rifles between 1970 and today, a production run that rivals many licensed AK variants produced under direct Soviet or Chinese state control.¹ The design remains in Serbian military inventory and in commercial production for export, most visibly through the semi-automatic Zastava PAP and ZPAP M70 lines sold into the United States.² Zastava M70 specifications, its 7.62×39mm chambering, and its relationship to the AK-47 are among the most frequently searched details about the rifle, alongside the perennial question of whether the Zastava M70 is still in service (it is, in Serbia and more than a dozen other states).

The rifle sits within the broader family of Cold War era Kalashnikov derivatives that includes the Soviet AKM and AK-74, but the M70's grenade-launching hardware and thicker steel construction set it apart from both, reflecting a doctrine that expected ordinary riflemen, not dedicated grenadiers, to fire rifle grenades in the field.

{{photo-req side=right q="Zastava M70 rifle with folding grenade sight" caption="A Zastava M70 rifle, showing the folding rifle-grenade sight over the gas block that distinguishes it from Soviet-pattern Kalashnikovs" alt="Zastava M70 assault rifle with grenade-launching sight raised"}}

The Zastava M70 fires the 7.62×39mm intermediate cartridge from a 30-round detachable magazine, through a long-stroke gas-operated, rotating-bolt action lifted directly from the Kalashnikov system.³ Muzzle velocity is rated at 720 m/s, with an effective point-target range of roughly 350 m and iron sights graduated out to 1,000 m, figures essentially identical to the AKM it competed against.³ Cyclic rate of fire is 600 rpm, and the rifle offers select-fire capability between semi-automatic and full-automatic through a conventional AK-pattern selector lever on the right side of the receiver.³

The Reinforced Receiver and RPK-Style Trunnion

Where the M70 diverges most clearly from a standard AK is in its receiver. Early M70s used a milled receiver copied from the third-pattern Soviet AK. By the mid-1970s Zastava switched to a stamped receiver to cut production costs, but domestic Yugoslav sheet steel proved too soft for the combined stress of automatic fire and grenade launching, so engineers thickened the stamping to 1.5 mm and adopted a bulged front trunnion borrowed from the Soviet RPK light machine gun rather than the thinner AKM trunnion.^4,5 The result, standardized around 1974, is a rifle that is noticeably heavier than a Soviet AKM (4.3 kg empty against roughly 3.1 kg for an AKM) but far better able to absorb repeated grenade discharges without cracking.⁴

The Grenade-Launching Rail and Flip-Up Sight

The M70's most distinctive feature, and the one most often cited by collectors and armourers as the giveaway that separates it from every other AK clone, is its integral rifle-grenade system.⁵ A folding ladder sight is mounted over the gas block. Raising it into firing position mechanically closes off the gas port, stopping the action from cycling while a rifle grenade is fired off a muzzle-mounted spigot, protecting the internal parts from the much higher pressures a grenade launch generates.⁵ Soviet-issue AKs and AKMs have no equivalent factory-fitted hardware, since the Soviet doctrine relied on separate underbarrel grenade launchers rather than muzzle-launched rifle grenades fired by ordinary infantry rifles.

{{photo-req side=left q="Zastava M70 grenade sight gas cutoff detail" caption="Close-up of the folding grenade-sight and gas cutoff assembly unique to the Zastava M70 family" alt="Detail of Zastava M70 folding grenade sight over the gas block"}}

Furniture, Sights, and the Threaded Muzzle

Furniture is wood or polymer depending on production era and variant, with a distinctive triple-vented handguard that runs longer than the AKM's.⁴ Many M70 variants add iron sights with tritium inserts for low-light aiming, a detail rarely fitted to contemporaneous Soviet-bloc rifles of the same generation.⁴ The barrel carries a threaded muzzle for the detachable grenade-launching spigot and, on later production, a conventional muzzle device. A folding stock is available on the "AB" suffixed variants, and the rifle mounts a bayonet lug and retains factory support for grenade-launch capability across most military-pattern variants, unlike the commercial PAP exports built for the American market, which delete the bayonet lug, night sights, and grenade sight entirely to comply with U.S. import law.²

Because the M70 predates any rail standard, it has no factory optic rail, and mounting modern optics generally requires an aftermarket side-rail bracket, a real limitation against Western rifles built to STANAG or Picatinny standards from the outset.

Yugoslavia's search for a Kalashnikov of its own began earlier than most accounts suggest. In 1959, two Albanian soldiers defected across the border carrying early-pattern Soviet AK-47s, giving Zastava's engineers their first close look at the rifle, though not enough documentation to reproduce it outright.¹ More complete samples reportedly reached Belgrade later that year from an unnamed third-world government, and by the early 1960s Zastava had enough material to reverse-engineer a working copy without any cooperation from Moscow, a byproduct of Yugoslavia's independent, non-aligned stance after Josip Broz Tito's break with Stalin in 1948.¹

Unlicensed production of the first Yugoslav AK derivative, an unofficial design designated M64, began in 1964, built around a milled receiver patterned on the third-generation Soviet AK.¹ After field trials and revisions, the Yugoslav government formally adopted the improved M64A for serial production in 1970 as the AP M70 (Automatska Puška Model 1970), replacing the older Zastava M59/66 SKS derivative as the standard infantry rifle of the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA).¹

By the mid-1970s, rising production costs pushed Zastava toward a stamped-receiver design, but early attempts cracked under the combined stress of automatic fire and rifle-grenade launches because domestic steel stock was softer than the Soviet equivalent.⁴ The fix, a thicker 1.5 mm stamping with an RPK-style bulged trunnion, entered production around 1974 and defined the M70B1/M70AB2 generation that made up the bulk of JNA rifles by the 1980s.⁴ Zastava exported the design and, in Iraq's case, the tooling itself: in 1979 Zastava agreed to help equip Saddam Hussein's new small-arms industry, and by 1980 Iraqi state arsenals at Al-Qadissiya were producing an M70B1 copy known as the Tabuk, which became the standard Iraqi service rifle through the Iran–Iraq War and beyond.⁸

{{photo-req side=right q="Zastava Arms Kragujevac factory" caption="The Zastava Arms industrial complex in Kragujevac, Serbia, the plant that has produced the M70 since 1970" alt="Zastava Arms factory buildings in Kragujevac"}}

The factory itself became a wartime target in its own right. During NATO's 1999 air campaign over the Kosovo War, the Kragujevac complex was struck twice within a week, once on 9 April and again on 12 April, because Zastava was a principal supplier to Yugoslav government forces.⁶ Reconstruction dragged on for years afterward, but the small-arms lines resumed and the M70 stayed in Serbian production even as Yugoslavia itself dissolved around it.

When the Yugoslav federation broke apart in the 1990s, JNA arsenals containing millions of M70 rifles were seized, looted, or simply inherited by every side of the fighting. The rifle became the single most common infantry weapon of the Yugoslav Wars, carried by the Serbian-backed Army of Republika Srpska, Croatian forces, and Bosnia and Herzegovina's own units alike, since all three had drawn on the same pre-war JNA stockpiles.⁹ The heaviest-built M70B2 and M70AB2 variants, the versions with the thickened stamped receiver, were also the most numerous JNA-issue models and consequently the most common rifles photographed in Sarajevo, Vukovar, and Kosovo throughout the decade of fighting.⁹

Exported and licence-built copies gave the design a long combat life outside the Balkans as well. Iraq's Tabuk clone armed Republican Guard and regular army units through the Iran–Iraq War, the 1991 Gulf War, and the 2003 Iraq War, and Tabuk-pattern rifles resurfaced again in the hands of ISIS fighters during the Iraqi Civil War of 2014–2017, captured from overrun Iraqi army depots.⁸

Post-Yugoslav surplus M70s kept circulating for decades after the wars that scattered them ended. Rifles from ex-Yugoslav stocks have been documented in the War in Afghanistan (2001–2021), where captured examples equipped Afghan Local Police units and were recovered from Taliban weapons caches, and in the Syrian Civil War, where M70s moved through the same regional grey-market networks that armed multiple factions with mismatched Kalashnikov-pattern rifles.¹ In Central Africa, Zaire's army and Mobutu-aligned mercenary formations fielded M70s during the First Congo War of 1996 to 1997, including the ill-fated "White Legion" of foreign volunteers assembled to defend the collapsing Mobutu government.⁷

{{photo-req side=left q="Army of Republika Srpska soldiers Bosnian War" caption="Soldiers of the Army of Republika Srpska during the Bosnian War, a conflict in which the M70 was the most common rifle on every side" alt="Republika Srpska soldiers with Kalashnikov-pattern rifles during the Bosnian War"}}

The most recent chapter is also the most unusual. In 2022, Croatia, which had inherited large stocks of ex-JNA M70s at independence, donated an estimated 20,000 to 35,000 M70 rifles to Ukraine in the opening weeks of the full-scale Russo-Ukrainian war, alongside FN FAL rifles and ammunition.¹⁰ Separately, the United Kingdom purchased M70, M70A, and M70AB2 rifles, reportedly sourced from Croatian surplus, to equip its Operation ORBITAL training camps so that Ukrainian recruits could train on the same Kalashnikov-pattern weapons they would carry into combat, rather than on the British Army's own L85 rifles.¹¹ The rifle also appears among the mixed arsenals documented in the hands of Palestinian militant factions, including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, during the Gaza War, though it remains a minority weapon there compared to more common Chinese- and Russian-pattern AK-47s.¹

The M70 family grew through more than a dozen factory designations across five decades, driven mostly by receiver material, stock type, and sight configuration rather than any change in caliber or basic mechanism.

• M70 / M70A — Original milled-receiver rifles; the M70 carries a fixed wood stock, the "A" suffix denotes the folding-stock underfolder version.¹²
• M70B / M70AB — Milled-receiver rifles with a pinned rather than screwed barrel and standard AK magazine compatibility; again split into fixed-stock (B) and underfolder (AB) models.¹²
• M70B1 / M70AB1 — First-generation stamped-receiver rifles (roughly 0.9 to 1.0 mm steel) with a flatter trunnion, produced from the mid-1970s before the thickened receiver was standardized.⁴
• M70B2 / M70AB2 — The definitive stamped-receiver rifles, using the thickened 1.5 mm receiver and RPK-style bulged trunnion from 1974 onward; the most numerous variants in JNA and successor-state service.⁴
• M70AB3 / M70B3 — Later production replacing the folding grenade sight with an underslung 40 mm grenade launcher mount, moving the grenade-launching role off the rifle's own muzzle.⁵
• M92 — A shortened carbine derivative with a truncated barrel and handguard for vehicle crews and support troops.¹
• M76 and the Tabuk sniper family — A magnified, 7.92×57mm Mauser-chambered semi-automatic designated marksman rifle built on the same basic action, later the basis for Iraq's Tabuk sniper rifle once Zastava tooling reached Al-Qadissiya.⁸
• Zastava PAP / ZPAP M70 — Modern semi-automatic-only commercial variants built for export, chiefly to the United States, with the bayonet lug, night sights, and grenade-launcher hardware removed to satisfy import restrictions, and in current production a 1.5 mm receiver with the RPK-pattern bulged trunnion as standard.²

{{photo-req side=right q="Zastava PAP M70 civilian rifle" caption="A commercial Zastava PAP M70 semi-automatic rifle, the civilian export descendant of the military M70 sold internationally, including in the United States" alt="Zastava PAP M70 civilian semi-automatic rifle"}}

The Zastava M70 remains in active or reserve service across a strikingly wide and geographically scattered set of states, a direct legacy of Cold War Yugoslav arms diplomacy and the chaotic post-1991 breakup of Yugoslavia's own stockpiles. Confirmed current or recent users include Iraq (through the licence-built Tabuk), Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Cyprus, Afghanistan, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Ukraine (since 2022), Angola, Libya, Liberia, Rwanda, South Sudan, Burkina Faso, and Palestine among non-state and militia use.¹

Mali's army received roughly 1,000 M70 rifles in 2013, donated through Croatia and Cyprus as part of international support for Malian government forces during the Sahel insurgency that followed Libya's post-2011 arms proliferation.¹⁰ Serbia itself formally retired the M70 as its frontline standard-issue rifle around 2004 in favor of newer Zastava designs, though the type remains in reserve stocks and widespread civilian and paramilitary hands domestically, and Zastava continues to manufacture the platform for export.² The United States and United Kingdom are not military operators in the conventional sense, but both fielded M70-pattern rifles, the U.S. through the civilian PAP/ZPAP commercial market and the UK through surplus rifles purchased for Ukrainian troop training.¹¹

{{photo-req side=left q="Serbian Armed Forces infantry rifle" caption="Serbian infantry equipment reflecting the country's decades-long reliance on Zastava-built Kalashnikov-pattern rifles" alt="Serbian soldiers with Kalashnikov-pattern service rifles"}}

The M70's natural rival is not a Western rifle at all but the Soviet AKM it was built to match without ever copying outright. Both fire the same 7.62×39mm cartridge from the same basic long-stroke gas system at similar velocities and rates of fire, so the real differences show up in construction and doctrine rather than ballistics. The AKM's thinner stamped receiver keeps it lighter and cheaper to produce at Soviet-bloc industrial scale, while the M70's thickened 1.5 mm receiver and RPK-pattern trunnion add roughly a kilogram of weight in exchange for a rifle that can fire rifle grenades all day without cracking, a use case the AKM was never engineered around.⁴

Against the licence-built Iraqi Tabuk, the comparison is almost circular, since the Tabuk began life as a direct Zastava-supplied copy of the M70B1 and only diverged later as Iraqi industry adapted the design and, in its sniper-rifle form, rechambered a version for 7.92×57mm Mauser.⁸ The practical distinction that matters to a buyer or historian is less about mechanism and more about supply chain, an M70 traces back to a single Serbian factory with continuous production records, while Tabuk-marked rifles reflect a fractured Iraqi manufacturing base that stopped and restarted repeatedly across three wars.

Is the Zastava M70 still in service? Yes. Serbia retired it as its primary frontline rifle around 2004 but keeps large reserve stocks, and more than a dozen other states, including Bosnia and Herzegovina, Iran, Iraq (via the Tabuk), Jordan, and several African and Middle Eastern militaries, still field it.¹ Zastava also continues to manufacture semi-automatic civilian versions for export.²

What caliber does the Zastava M70 use? The military M70 is chambered in 7.62×39mm, the same intermediate cartridge used by the AK-47 and AKM, fed from 30-round detachable magazines.³

How does the Zastava M70 compare to an AK-47? The M70 uses the same basic gas-operated, rotating-bolt mechanism as the AK-47 but was reverse-engineered rather than licence-built, and adds a reinforced 1.5 mm receiver, an RPK-style bulged trunnion, and a folding grenade-launching sight not found on standard Soviet AKs.^4,5

What is the Zastava M70's price? Original military-surplus M70 rifles and their semi-automatic PAP/ZPAP civilian derivatives typically sell in the United States for roughly $600 to $1,200, depending on model, condition, and configuration, making it one of the cheaper AK-pattern rifles on the commercial market.¹⁴

Why does the Zastava M70 have a folding sight on the gas block? That sight is a combined rifle-grenade sight and gas cutoff. Raising it seals the gas port so the action will not cycle while a rifle grenade is fired off the muzzle, protecting the rifle's internals from the higher pressure of a grenade launch.⁵

Who manufactures the Zastava M70? Zastava Arms, based in Kragujevac, Serbia, has manufactured the M70 continuously since 1970, surviving the breakup of Yugoslavia and NATO's 1999 bombing of its own factory complex.^1,6