The Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence (GUR) has claimed to have destroyed two Russian helicopters and damaged a third in an operation that used MAGURA V5 unmanned surface vessels (USVs) armed with surface-to-air missiles (SAMs).
The operation, conducted by the GUR’s Group 13 special forces unit, took place in the Black Sea near Cape Tarkhankut off the western tip of the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula on 31 December 2024.
The SAMs used by the MAGURA V5s were identified by the GUR as “R-73 ‘SeeDragon’ missiles”: ground-launched variants of the Soviet-designed R-73 short-range air-to-air missile. Each USV can carry two R-73s mounted on launch rails.
The GUR initially claimed on its website on 31 December to have destroyed one Russian Mi-8 helicopter and to have damaged another. However, in an update on 2 January 2025 the GUR revised its report to claim that two Mi-8s had been destroyed and a third helicopter damaged.
The GUR posted video imagery on its website on 31 December, taken from the MAGURA V5s’ infra-red cameras, to corroborate its claims. The footage clearly shows the MAGURA V5s coming under machine gun attack as well as multiple Russian helicopters and one fixed-wing aircraft. The USVs are seen to launch multiple missiles, with at least one Mi-8-type helicopter being struck before crashing into to the sea.
Ukraine’s 5.5 m long MAGURA V5 USVs have typically used by Ukrainian special forces as ‘suicide drones’ to conduct explosives-laden ramming attacks on Russian shipping in the Black Sea. However, Ukrainian literature disseminated at the Eurosatory 2024 exhibition in Paris in June 2024 noted that the USVs could be used for a variety of missions – such as surveillance, patrolling and reconnaissance operations, mine countermeasures missions and search-and-rescue operations – and be armed with weapons such as SAMs, machine guns and surface-to-surface missiles.
For the 31 December operation it is possible that the MAGURA V5 feigned an approach to the Russian port at Sevastopol, which is about 100 km further to the southeast of Cape Tarkhankut, to lure out and then ambush Russian aviation assets responding to their presence.
