Crimea Mystery As Ukraine Denies Role in Russian Helicopter Crash

Ka-27PL helicopters on May 7, 2015 in Baltiysk, Russia. Ukraine said on Wednesday that Russia lost a Ka-27 helicopter over western Crimea, but Russia said an Mi-24 helicopter suffered a technical fault and crashed.

Ukraine did not shoot down a Russian helicopter in western Crimea early on Wednesday, its navy has said, amid contradictory reports from Moscow and Kyiv.

Lieutenant Commander Dmytro Pletenchuk, spokesperson for the Ukrainian Navy, told Newsweek that Ukraine did not target and strike a Russian helicopter that crashed off coast of the annexed peninsula on Wednesday.

Ukraine could not confirm whether the incident was the result of friendly fire, nor whether the crew survived, Pletenchuk said.

Earlier on Wednesday, Kyiv’s military said a Russian Ka-27 naval helicopter had crashed in western Crimea. Russia’s defense ministry, however, said that one of its Mi-24 attack helicopters had come down in the Black Sea at around 6 a.m. Moscow time.

Preliminary details suggest the helicopter crashed after an unspecified equipment failure, Russian state news agencies reported.

A prominent Russian military blogger said an Mi-24 had crashed west of Cape Tarkhankut, claiming the crew had been killed.

Cape Tarkhankut is northwest of the Crimean port city of Sevastopol, where Russia partly bases its Black Sea naval fleet.

Ukraine’s military said on Wednesday that Russia has lost a total of 325 helicopters since the start of all-out war in February 2022. This tally is the same as Tuesday, not accounting for the loss of a helicopter early on Wednesday.

In late March, a Russian Su-27 crashed into the sea near Sevastopol. The Russian-installed governor of the city, Mikhail Razvozhayev, said the pilot had survived and was rescued two hundred meters (219 yards) from the Crimean shoreline.

However, the British government assessed earlier this month that there was a “realistic possibility” that the jet could have been a victim of friendly fire by Russia’s own air defenses.

In June 2023, Kyiv said Russian forces in Ukraine had lost “five times more helicopters” than during Moscow’s operations in Chechnya. Russia lost 60 combat and transport helicopters in fighting in the republic throughout the 1990s and early 2000s following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine’s military said last summer.

Ukraine has used long-range missiles to take out a slew of Russian helicopters in Moscow-controlled parts of the country.

Ukraine’s special forces said in 2023 that their fighters had destroyed nine Russian helicopters in strikes on airbases in the Zaporizhzhia city of Berdiansk and Luhansk City. Both sites were far behind the front lines in eastern and southern Ukraine, in Russian-occupied territory.

In the wake of the strikes, open-source intelligence reports later suggested that Ukraine may have damaged up to 21 Russian helicopters.

Update 4/10/2024 at 7:30 a.m. ET: This article has been updated with additional information.

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