[Pibwl]

To make it clear: only BMD issue concerns the Russian oob directly.
As for BMP, I can only guess, that not all the vehicle's capacity (2+9) was actually used, as it was in case of Poland and Czechoslovakia, but it was only for information. Moreover, I have a sketch of East German usage in a book, which shows 9 men only seated in BMP ("als Fahrzeug der mot. Schuetzengruppe" - I don't know German terminology well).

As a point of interest, I attach cross-sections of BMD-1.

Michal