Both rifles are also outfitted with a Picatinny rail on the top of the dust cover and on the sides and bottom of the suppressor, forward of the handguard.

The captured pistol was examined by the TsNIITochMash at Klimovsk by a team of designers that included G. Petropavlov, Yu Krulov, V. Sabelinikov, A. Neougodev, A. Deryagin, A. Khinikadze, I. Kas'yanov, P. Serdyukov, V. Petrov, and V. Levchenko.

[9] With increasing tensions between the West and the Soviet Union during the late 1970s and 1980s, and both the United States and the USSR locked in a war between proxies, the KGB and GRU ordered the development of small arms suitable for covert operations around the world and in 1981, weapon designers P. I. Serdyukov and V. F. Krasnikov of TsNIITochMash began working on a combination of a new suppressed rifle and subsonic cartridge.

[10] Development of the VSS Vintorez was carried out in parallel with the AS Val, to provide a suppressed sniper rifle for Spetsnaz undercover or clandestine units and capable of defeating NATO body armour at ranges up to 400 m (440 yd) with little noise as possible.

[11][12] The AS Val uses a modified Kalashnikov action - a gas-operated rotating bolt combined with an integral suppressor and chambered for the 9×39mm SP-6 cartridge firing a heavy 250 grain bullet at subsonic speed.

[9] The suppressor makes use of the dual-chamber principle: the propellant gases are vented through specially designed perforations along the barrel into the first chamber, where the hot gases cool down and lose pressure before passing through the second chamber via a series of mesh screens which break the gas stream even further before leaving the barrel.

[15] The VSS Vintorez suppressor and operating systems are exactly the same as the AS Val, but optimised to fire the 9×39mm SP-5 subsonic cartridge with a hardened steel or tungsten tip to defeat body armour.