Ukrainian military helicopter crashed, suspected to have been shot down by a Russian UAV

“Four members of the Mi-8 helicopter crew, including the command pilot, navigator, air engineer and gunner, were killed while on a mission to intercept a Russian unmanned aircraft (UAV) last week,” the city council of Brody in Ukraine’s Poltava province said on July 6.

Newspaper Zmistbased in Poltava province, added that the Mi-8 helicopter crashed near the village of Starykovka, east of the provincial capital.

AMK Mapping, an X social network account specializing in monitoring Ukraine’s war, said the helicopter belonged to the 16th Independent Army Air Brigade and raised the possibility that the aircraft was hit by an air-to-air missile launched from Russia’s Geran-2 suicide UAV.

Kirill Fedorov, a blogger affiliated with the Russian military, had a similar opinion when he stated that the Mi-8 was shot down during an attempt to intercept the UAV.

Meanwhile, Russian military news site Voenny Osvedomitel I think it’s too early to conclude the cause. “It cannot be determined whether it was hit by a missile from the Geran UAV, or affected by an explosion at close range when the UAV was hit,” this news site said.

Ukrainian officials have not commented on the information.

Ukraine once obtained fragments of the Geran-2 UAV mounted with R-60M short-range air-to-air missiles. This missile model has been in service by the Soviet Union since 1970, equipped with an infrared detector and a continuous bar fragment warhead weighing 3 kg, with a range of about 8 km.

The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), based in the US, said in February that the Geran UAV initially carried surface-to-air missiles facing forward, but then mounted the missile backwards so it could fire backwards.

“The first option is for Geran-2s that specialize in hunting Ukrainian aircraft for interception missions. The rear-facing projectile mounting option allows the UAV to attack the following aircraft while still aiming for the original target,” ISW explained.

Alexander Kots, a war correspondent for Russia’s Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper, said the Geran UAV had repeatedly shot down Ukrainian manned aircraft, including a Su-27 heavy fighter and two Mi-24 armed helicopters.

Helicopters are considered one of the effective means of intercepting UAVs, but this operation carries risks when the pilot has to get close to the target, putting the aircraft at risk of damage from explosions or flying debris.

The US in early June accused Iranian UAVs of “shooting down an AH-64 Apache armed helicopter” near the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran at that time did not accept responsibility and said this was an accident.

Western experts also believe that the incident over the Strait of Hormuz could have been an unintended mid-air collision, when the US helicopter crashed into an Iranian UAV due to poor visibility, flew into a debris field, or had a technical problem and crashed while pursuing the target.