Explosion as Russian Helicopter Base, Aircraft Factory Attacked

Videos have begun to circulate on social media Sunday showing a drone strike on a helicopter base in the Russian city of Sochi, around the same time as a similar strike in Smolensk at an aircraft factory.

At approximately 7 a.m. ET, Nexta, an independent news outlet based out of Poland, took to X, the platform previously known as Twitter, to share a clip purportedly showing a drone flying over Sochi. The initial post further claimed that the craft had crashed and exploded, but this could not be seen in the clip. A resort city on the Black Sea in southwestern Russia, Sochi is best known internationally for hosting the 2014 Winter Olympics.

Roughly an hour later, Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to the Ukrainian minister of internal affairs and a prolific online commentator, shared another clip of the Sochi incident to X, reportedly taken from Russian social media accounts.

“Russian Telegram channels report a drone attack near Sochi,” he wrote. “There has been (unconfirmed so far) information that a helicopter parking lot in Adler area was hit.”

A little before 9 a.m. ET, Kyiv Post correspondent Jason Jay Smart shared a third clip of the drone strike, this time showing the craft actually crashing and exploding. Smart also claimed that flights in the Sochi area had been canceled as a result.

Following the spread of these clips online, the Ukrainian news outlet Ukrainska Pravda reported that the strike in Sochi had been carried out by the Ukrainian Defense Intelligence agency and had successfully targeted the parking lot of a helicopter base in the city’s Adler district.

Newsweek reached out to Russian and Ukrainian officials via email for comment.

In response to the Sochi incident, Margarita Simonyan, a prominent Russian propagandist and editor-in-chief of the state-run outlet RT, claimed on Telegram that part of the drone had impacted near her family’s home in the Adler district. This strike, she added, should be met with further nuclear threats.

“Last night a combat drone fell right opposite our family house in Adler where both my mom and I grew up, and where my relatives still live with their small children,” Simonyan wrote. “The targets are farther each time, the stakes are higher, and it proves that the nuclear ultimatum has no alternative.”

Around the same time as the strike in Sochi, The Kyiv Independent reported that another drone strike had been successfully carried out in Smolensk, a city roughly 250 miles west of Moscow, near Russia’s border with ally Belarus. According to the report, this strike targeted an aircraft factory, operated by Russia’s Tactical Missile Armament state corporation.