A Ukrainian brigade appeared to use video-game clips to say it took down a Russian Su-25

Matthew Loh
Updated ·3 min read
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  • A Ukrainian brigade announced the destruction of a Russian Su-25 using what appears to be video-game clips.

  • The 110th Mechanized Brigade posted the footage on Facebook on Thursday, celebrating its reported win.

  • The footage resembles gameplay from titles such as "War Thunder," "Arma 3," and "Digital Combat Simulator."

Ukraine's 110th Mechanized Brigade announced on Thursday that it downed a Russian Su-25 "Frogfoot" fighter in the Donbas, posting footage from what seems to be a video game.

"We promised that the genocide of Russian 'Sukhois' would continue, we're keeping the promise!" the brigade wrote in a caption for the video on its official Facebook account.

The brigade said this marked the second Su-25 downed by antiaircraft guns on Thursday, with the Ukrainian outlet The Kyiv Independent reporting that this was the sixth such fighter said to have been destroyed in May.

The video posted by the 110th brigade shows two planes flying over a virtual grass field before the camera switches to a frontal view of the jet's cockpit. The aircraft sustains damage and dives nose-first into the ground.

Before impact, the video switches to a blurry view of smoke rising above a field.

The footage resembles gameplay from titles such as "Arma 3," "Digital Combat Simulator," and "War Thunder," all of which feature the Su-25.

Notably, footage from Arma 3 is often found in misinformation about active conflict zones, such as the war in Gaza. Recordings from the online multiplayer game have repeatedly been used to misrepresent battles in Ukraine.

But the 110th's intention behind posting the clips is unclear, as the brigade neither claimed it was a video of live combat nor addressed it as virtual footage.

On May 19, the same Facebook account announced that its forces had destroyed four Su-25s with a video of 3D-rendered jet models.

The 110th Mechanized Brigade and press teams for Ukraine's defense ministry and armed forces didn't immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider sent outside regular business hours.

Several pro-Russia social-media accounts have seized on the clip as a means to throw doubt on Ukraine's reports of casualties inflicted on Moscow's assets and troops.

"Official account of the 110th Mechanized Brigade posted another 'alleged downing' of a Su-25," wrote one milblogger.

Ukraine said on Thursday that it had destroyed 355 Russian fixed-wing aircraft since the war began in February, a tally that hasn't been verified by its allies. British intelligence estimated in April that Russia had lost at least 100 fixed-wing combat aircraft.

Russian forces have been intensifying attacks on the front line in recent weeks, with its defense ministry saying on Thursday that it captured the village of Andriivka in the Donbas.

In the north, Moscow's troops pushed weakened Ukrainian lines back from the border and carried out missile strikes on the city of Kharkiv on Thursday, which CNN reported killed seven people.

Kyiv has meanwhile been receiving a renewed flow of military equipment from the US as part of a long-awaited tranche of $61 billion in aid, which Congress passed in April.

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