I have to admit that I’ve I’ve got some questions about this footage.

• Russia and Ukraine both have shit-tons of air defense along the border. How is Ukraine having a pretty-visible transport helicopter cruise on into Russia? And not only was it able to do so, but Ukraine had to be pretty confident that there was a hole in Russian air defenses large enough to do so.

• Belgorod is the one place in Russia that Ukraine has definitely been hitting with PGMs. If there’s one place I’d think that there’d be air defenses in Russia, it’d be there.

• On top of that, this was in daytime. If Ukraine is gonna do covert behind-the-lines operations, wouldn’t it be at night?

• If Ukraine can just fly helicopters into Russia, why? I mean, they’re faster, but if one can smuggle soldiers in via the air, it’s gotta be easier and quieter to do so on the ground. Kozynka is virtually on top of the front line.

• It’s not clear to me what the source of this video is. I’m assuming that if this is real and in Russia, it has to be Ukrainian, on the assumption that if Russia can have a UAV filming this, they would have attacked the helicopter?

EDIT: Note that about this time, Russian separatist fighters did enter Kozynka, so at least the part about getting forces into the area does check out. This was released by Ukraine March 18, four days after the date listed above as being on the helicopter insertion:

https://mil.in.ua/en/news/liberation-forces-raised-flags-in-another-village-in-belgorod-region/

That being said, Ukraine only cited the separatists as a source, so the citation chain is a bit murky there too – and in fact explicitly pointed out that there wasn’t enough context for it to be clear where the photos were from – but at least they considered the material solid enough to put it up as news.