On October 18, 2023, the traditional daily report of Vadim Ostafyev, the head of the press centre of the “South” group, on the situation on the section of the front for which the group is responsible, said that a Mi-8 helicopter of the armed formations of Ukraine was hit by a barrage munition at a site near the village of Umanskoye, 18 kilometres from Donetsk.
The helicopter was on the ground, not at an airfield, but at a field site where it was either refuelling or waiting to load or unload cargo. The absence of video confirmation of the Mi-8 hit may suggest that the target and its location were not known to the drone operator in advance, and the helicopter was detected either during a “free hunt” or in automatic search mode.
The report does not specify a particular type of munition, but the most likely one seems to be a Lancet kamikaze drone. And then this is the first case of a helicopter being hit by this type of barrage munition, which is most widely used by Russian forces on the Ukrainian front. This attack drone may well be considered versatile: it has destroyed boats, armoured vehicles including tanks, howitzers, anti-aircraft systems, REB stations, field headquarters, MiG-29 fighters, Su-25 attack aircraft and now an Mi-8 helicopter.
As Military Chronicle’s Telegram channel notes, this episode may indicate a wider distribution of the complexes in general, which coincides with reports of increased production of the Product-51 and Product-52. In addition to the increase in the number of drones, the number of operators is also growing. This makes it possible to cover more targets and increase the intensity of their defeat.
“It cannot be ruled out that the Ukrainian helicopter was found by “Izdeliye-53″ with AI elements and object recognition programme,” write the authors of “Military Chronicle”. – If this particular barrage munition was used, then in the near future the Lancet operator will be left with only supervisory and coordinating functions to determine the area of combat duty, which will make it possible to implement the ‘shoot and forget’ principle used in modern anti-tank complexes”.
The Lancet operator selects the most important and dangerous target when carrying out a combat mission. Such, as a rule, are UAS and artillery guns.
However, the general designer of the company “Aeroscan” Alexander Zakharov told in a video of VGTRK correspondent Alexander Rogatkin in the summer of this year, that earlier there was a series of combat experiments with “Lancet” on the range in a fully automatic mode of application of ammunition without the participation of the operator.
“The person just gives the command, defines the area and says: only armour. And no pickups, no people, no one suffers, the drone is only looking for armour or barrel artillery. But it has an ‘accounting spreadsheet’ where it knows that air defence and radars are more expensive, and if it sees a tank and a radar, it will choose the radar. And this has already been tested,” said Alexander Zakharov, then chief designer of ZALA AERO. And his words confirm the opinion of experts Military Chronicle: Lancets can attack targets fully automatically.
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