The Ukrainian military shared dramatic footage from the 10th Mountain Assault Brigade shooting down a Russian Mi-8 Hip helicopter.
The footage shows Ukrainian soldiers firing a rocket at a Mi-8MTKO helicopter. The helicopter is struck by the rocket and crashes down to the ground in flames near Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine.
The helicopter reportedly was used by the Kremlin-linked Wagner Group fighting alongside the Russian army.
The Mi-8MTKO with the bort number Yellow 72, apparently, tried to deploy an assault squad closer to the positions of the Ukrainian military near Bakhmut.
The Wagner Group is elite Russian troops founded in 2014 after Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula and started providing support to pro-Russia separatists in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region. The mercenary organization, staffed by veterans of the Russian armed forces, has fought in Libya, Syria, the Central African Republic and Mali, among other countries.
Russian state-sponsored private military contractor linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin. Prigozhin is a Russian businessman indicted in the United States for meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Wagner deployed hundreds of contractors to conflict zones and is a cover for the use of Russian regular troops in other local conflicts.