A Ukrainian sniper has claimed to shatter the world record for the longest kill shot in history after eliminating two Russian troops from an astonishing distance of 4,000 metres.
The soldier beat the previous world record for long-distance assassination set by another one of Kyiv’s marksmen in 2023 by 200 metres, according to Ukraine’s 24 Channel.
A video published on Telegram shows the sniper pair – the shooter and the spotter – making the lethal strike on the Pokrovsk–Myrnohrad defensive line.
The record was set using a 14.5mm Snipex Alligator rifle, from which a bullet was launched in the Pokrovsky direction and travelled through a window in a building behind which Russian servicemen were located, left of a visible rooftop pipe.
The historic shot was fired on August 14 and was guided by artificial intelligence working with a drone reconnaissance complex.
It occurred on the Pokrovsk–Myrnohrad defensive line, within the responsibility zone of Ukraine’s ‘Donetsk’ operational group.
The previous world record for the longest kill shot belonged to 58-year-old SBU sniper Vyacheslav Kovalsky, a Ukrainian who killed a Russian soldier 3,800 meters in the Kherson region using a multi-caliber Horizon’s Lord rifle.
At the time, the country’s special forces said their shooters were ‘rewriting the rules of global sniping’ using Ukrainian-made weapons.
While not all shots cover as much ground as the purported 4,000 metres Ukraine said its Snipex Alligator achieved, sharpshooters’ high-precision kills have beaten the odds and saved countless lives during conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
The fast-paced nature of firefights means even the highest-spec technology cannot always keep pace in challenging battlefield environments, making snipers’ reconnaissance and communication skills invaluable to their battalions.
US army sniper instructor Staff Sgt. Michael Turner explained: ‘We’ve got drones, we’ve got robots, we’ve got all kinds of stuff… but we still need that real-time battlefield information that keeps soldiers safe.’
Before the 2023 success of Ukraine’s ‘Lord of the Horizon’, the previous world record was held by a Canadian special operations sniper at a distance of 3,540 metres in 2017.
And before that, the world record was held by British sniper Craig Harrison, after he shot down a Taliban fighter in Afghanistan in 2009 from a distance of 2,478 metres.
In 2014, another British sniper killed a suicide bomber and five Taliban insurgents with a single bullet after it triggered the suicide vest one of them was wearing.
The shot was fired from 850 metres away.
The regular breaking of records is testament to how rapidly sniper technology has been advancing in recent years, with shooters using wind meters, laser rangefinders and advanced scopes to make their kills.
Surprisingly, stunning shots have also been made using dated weapons, with a machine gun first developed in WWII used by British special forces in Afghanistan.
While snipers and their spotters work closely to estimate ranges as accurately as possible, luck also plays a role – as shown by the various examples of single bullets killing multiple enemy fighters at once.
Snipers spend years learning their craft, honing their shooting skills into a deadly and precise science which takes into account everything from temperature to humidity and even the curvature and rotation of the earth.
Low temperatures and high altitudes result in thinner air, which results in less drag on the bullet and therefore less bullet drop. Low humidity, too, can result in denser air, which tends to drag the bullet down faster.
Ultimately, success comes down to the skill of the shooter, with tiny margins of less than a millimetre making the difference between their bullet hitting a wall, their own troops, or someone who is trying to kill them.