Ukrainian soldier breaks world record of longest kill shot: Here's how

It seems like something straight out of an action movie. An elite sniper landing a kill shot on two soldiers far away as a war rages. Except it really happened last week.

The sniper is said to be part of an elite Ukrainian ‘Ghost’ unit.  The incident is said to have occurred on Thursday (August 14) – the day before US President Donald Trump met Russian President Vladimir Putin at a high-profile summit in Alaska.

But what happened? How did the sniper break the record?

Let’s take a closer look

What happened?

The gunman, who is unnamed, is believed to have killed two Russian soldiers at a distance of four kilometres. The gunman is part of the Ukraine’s Pryvyd sniper platoon, also known as the ‘Ghost’ unit. The ‘Ghost’ unit is made up of eight sniper units from Ukraine’s Ground Forces.

These elite units have killed over 1,000 Russian soldiers across Ukraine over the past year. The gunman used a 14.5 millimetre Alligator sniper rifle. This is the weapon typically used by snipers during the Ukraine war. The rifle is designed to take out military hardware. It has a range of around two kilometres. It has a muzzle velocity of between 3,215 and 3,281 feet per second. It is made by Kharkiv-based arms company XADO-Holding.

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The incident occurred in Pokrovsk, which is around 56 kilometres northwest of Donetsk. This, along with Luhansk, all of which Russia controls, is part of the Donbas region in Eastern Ukraine which Putin has demanded Zelenskyy hand over in exchange for a peace deal.

Pokrovsk is a frontline city that was once home to 60,000 strong people. It sits atop large coking coal reserves. Until Russian forces moved closer, it was important to Ukraine’s military supply lines in the country’s east. Today, the city is all but ruined and a few hundred people remain. Russia is said to have deployed 110,000 soldiers to take the Donbas.

How did the gunman do it?

Dramatic visual show the bullet bursting through a glass window. The sniper and his spotter fire several rounds before hitting the target. The gunman was assisted by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and artificial intelligence (AI) – both of which have played a key role during the Ukrainian war.

Serhii Filimonov, commander of a Ukrainian military battalion called “Da Vinci Wolves,” which operates around Pokrovsk, has witnessed first-hand how Russia’s glacial advance on the city over the past year cost it heavily in killed and injured soldiers in the first half of 2025.

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Russian soldiers tried to advance by stealth but were hounded by Ukrainian soldiers flying small quadcopter drones mounted with cameras and explosives, he said. “Every prisoner says drones are the thing they are most afraid of, the thing that constantly kills them, and the things they see when they sleep, the nightmares they have,” Filimonov said in April.

Incidentally, the previous record was also held by a Ukrainian sniper. Viacheslav Kovalskyi, 58, had had taken out a target from 3.77 kilometers away in 2023. Kovalskyi, a veteran sniper from the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), used a domestic “Lord of the Horizon” rifle to make the shot.

Before that, a Canadian special operations held the world record. That shot, made in 2019, killed a soldier from 3.52 kilometres away. Another sniper is said to have taken out two Russian soldiers with a single bullet.

“Real-life experience has shown not only completely different requirements, but also the actual capabilities of Ukrainian weapons, which have far exceeded their creators’ expectations,” Ukrainian outlet Defence Express noted.

The Ukrainian resistance in and around Pokrovsk has blocked Russia’s ambition of taking the remaining parts of Ukraine’s Donetsk region, one of President Vladimir Putin’s principal war aims. Although its significance to Ukraine as a military supply centre has already faded, Kyiv-based military analyst Serhii Kuzan said Pokrovsk’s fall could free up Russian troops and open the door to more Russian advances in the region.

More than a million Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded since the invasion of Ukraine in February, 2022, almost a quarter of those since the start of this year, according to British military intelligence estimates.

With inputs from agencies