"Four people died. Eternal memory to our soldiers," Russian soldier Egor Guzenko said on his Telegram channel.
The Russian military apparently just shot down one of its own helicopters – inside Russia.
Russia accidentally downed its own Ka-29 helicopter with its air defense systems over Anapa, a town in Russia's Krasnodar Krai on the northern coast of the Black Sea, according to local reports. "In Anapa, our own air defense shot down our own helicopter," Egor Guzenko, a Russian soldier who runs a Telegram channel under the call sign "Thirteenth," wrote on Friday. [ ... ] There have been numerous cases throughout the war where Russia's air defenses fired at its own aircraft. More than a fifth of Russia's known manned aircraft and helicopter losses since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the war in Ukraine in February 2022 have been self-inflicted, according to data compiled and analyzed by Newsweek in late August 2023.
I'm not sure if Ukraine includes Russia's self-inflicted mishaps in the Ukrainian military's daily update of Russian losses. But as of June 20th, Russia had lost 326 helicopters since the start of its illegal invasion almost 850 days ago.
^^^ Putin apologists and tankies like to claim that Ukraine is "losing" the war. But Russia has sustained, so far, more than 50 times the casualties in Putin's "special operation" that the Soviet Union lost in its ten-year war in Afghanistan. And it may be a record for a country without a functioning navy to have sunk 29 enemy vessels the way Ukraine did. Most observers would say that it is Russia that is losing an unsustainable war.
Putin continues to irrationally squander massive amounts of resources and hundreds of thousands of lives on a war which HE cannot win. If you are in Russia and want this war to end, you need to remove Putin from power.
The bottom line is that Russia has no fucking business in Ukraine. Ukraine has the right to drive out invaders who have illegally occupied parts of its territory and who are targeting civilian Ukrainian lives and infrastructure. Peace in Europe requires a Russia which has learned its lesson regarding territorial encroachment.
