Death Appears on the Horizon: How Putin’s Killer Helicopters Torpedo Kiev’s Counteroffensive

And with increasing success, the Russian occupiers rely on their loud-rattling miracle weapon: the Kamov Ka-52 attack helicopter, nicknamed the “Alligator”. Every day new videos of successful combat missions of the 2700 hp rotor monster appear on Russian Telegram channels.

Here an American infantry fighting vehicle belonging to Bradley that he blows up, there a group of Ukrainian soldiers that he sees and kills in a field in the dead of night, there an armored column that he sets on fire. “Since the beginning of the Ukrainian counter-offensive, attack helicopters have been used much more intensively,” Israeli air force expert Guy Plopsky told the specialist portal “The War Zone”.

The killer helicopter drives Ukrainians to despair

The nasty thing about the Russian killer helicopter: it can fire its missiles up to ten kilometers away and uses its integrated laser beam to aim them at any conceivable target in its field of view – day or night. This puts the Alligator out of range of the vast majority of front-line Ukrainian anti-aircraft guns. A desperate Ukrainian soldier told the “Bild”: “We have nothing to fight the Russian helicopters five miles away.”

Although Ukraine has received numerous Western-made air defense systems, most of them are used to defend its cities and the civilian population. On the other hand, there is a lack of mobile defense systems for the frontline troops. Those deployed are increasingly spotted and attacked by Russian drones as soon as they turn on their radar systems.

The alligator will soon become even more dangerous

A deadly hole in Ukraine’s arsenal, air war expert Thomas Newdick writes for “The War Zone”: “The lack of air defenses at the front creates a dead zone in which the alligator can operate safely.” After Ukraine shot down many overflying attack helicopters at the start of the war, Putin’s helicopter pilots now used the safe zone behind the Russian front forts to bring death into the Ukrainian zone with millimeter precision from a safe distance.

Since 2008, the fast killer helicopter with a speed of 310 km/h has been mass-produced in Russia. And soon the Alligator will be equipped with a new type of missile that can be fired even from a distance of 15 kilometers.

This is not good news for Ukrainian troops, which need military victory more urgently than ever since the successful defense of the capital Kyiv at the start of Russia’s offensive war in February 2022.