OPEN LETTER: To the Czech Mi-24V — the Crocodile that learned to hunt Russian drones

Introduction: Dear helicopter

A letter to a machine that became a symbol

Dear Mi-24V. You have been called many things. The Hind, as NATO named you — a name that suggests something soft, something gentle, something prey. The Krokodil, as the Soviets who built you called you — the Crocodile — which is much closer to the truth. You were designed to be a flying tank: armored, fast, capable of carrying troops while simultaneously engaging targets. A contradiction in concept that turned into one of the most recognized military helicopters ever built.

I am writing to you from a comfortable distance — not from a cockpit, not from a flight line, not from the territory where you now operate. I am a journalist who follows wars in the only way available to people like me: through screens, through sources, through the accumulating record of what happens when sophisticated machines meet the realities of a war that nobody designed you for. But I have been paying attention. And what I have seen of your service in Ukraine deserves to be spoken to directly, as if you could hear it. You cannot. But the people who decided to send you can. And the people who decided to fly you do.

From Czechoslovakia to Ukraine: the long journey

You were manufactured in the Soviet era, at the Mil Moscow Helicopter Plant. You served the armies of the Warsaw Pact, including the armed forces of Czechoslovakia. When that country became the Czech Republic, you became a Czech helicopter — part of an air force that was transitioning, year by year, from Soviet-era equipment to NATO-compatible platforms. You were not the future. But you were there, operational, maintained, capable. And when Ukraine needed helicopters and the Czech Republic needed to contribute, you became the bridge.

The Czech Republic transferred eight Mi-24Vs to Ukraine across three tranches: two in May 2022, two in 2023, and the final two in March 2024. Czech Defense Minister Jana Černochová confirmed the last delivery. The replacement plan — Bell AH-1Z Viper attack helicopters and UH-1Y Venom utility helicopters — represents the Czech Air Force's own transition to a post-Soviet capability. You were the bridge between what was and what is coming. That is not a minor role. It is, sometimes, the most important one.

What the Mi-24V is and why it matters in 2026

The design philosophy of the Hind

The Mi-24 was designed in the late 1960s and entered Soviet service in 1972. Its design philosophy was unusual for its era: it combined the role of a gunship — an attack helicopter with substantial weapons payload — with the role of a troop carrier, with an internal cabin capable of accommodating eight soldiers. The concept was a direct response to the tactical lessons of early helicopter warfare, including the Vietnam War's demonstration that helicopters were vulnerable to ground fire and that combining fire support with transport could reduce that vulnerability by allowing the gunship to clear the landing zone before the troops dismounted from the same aircraft.

The Mi-24V variant introduced the Shturm anti-tank missile system and a redesigned nose with tandem cockpits — the pilot in the rear, the gunner in the front. The characteristic nose shape, with its stepped cockpit arrangement and the stub wings loaded with weapons pylons, gives the Mi-24 its distinctive silhouette: recognizable instantly, associated immediately with Soviet military power, and now — in Ukrainian colors — associated with something else entirely.

Why a Soviet-designed helicopter is still relevant

In a conflict dominated by drones, precision missiles, and electronic warfare, the continued operational relevance of a helicopter designed in the 1960s might seem puzzling. It is not. The Mi-24V's relevance in the current conflict derives from several specific characteristics that remain genuinely useful regardless of its age. First, its armored crew cabin: the Hind has more armor protection than most attack helicopters, allowing it to survive ground fire that would destroy lighter platforms. Second, its speed: the Mi-24V is one of the fastest military helicopters ever built, capable of exceeding 320 kilometers per hour in level flight, which makes it difficult to track and engage with many standard air defense systems. Third, its weapons flexibility: its pylons can carry anti-tank missiles, unguided rockets, gun pods, and — in the role Ukraine has developed — specialized equipment for engaging aerial targets.

The Mi-24V was not designed to hunt drones. Nobody was, in 1972. But the tactical evolution that Ukrainian crews have imposed on the platform — adapting it to engage low-altitude, slow-moving drone targets in the specific electromagnetic and tactical environment of the current conflict — represents exactly the kind of improvisation under pressure that defines effective military adaptation. The Czech Republic sent you knowing what you were. Ukraine found a new use for what you could become.

The drone threat that changed your mission

The Shahed problem

The Shahed-136 (Iranian designation) — which Russia has used in large numbers under the designation Geran-2 — presented Ukrainian air defense with a specific challenge when it first appeared in significant numbers in late 2022. The Shahed is a small, slow, low-flying drone: it typically cruises at altitudes between 100 and 300 meters, at speeds between 150 and 200 kilometers per hour, and it has a radar cross-section that makes it difficult to track with the radar systems designed to engage high-altitude, high-speed threats. It flies below the engagement envelopes of many conventional surface-to-air missile systems. It can be intercepted by guns and short-range missiles, but in the volumes Russia deploys them — dozens or hundreds in a single wave — the attrition costs of intercepting each one with expensive missiles are unsustainable.

Ukraine's air defense community responded to the Shahed problem with an inventive combination of approaches: mobile gun systems, electronic warfare jamming, FPV intercept drones, and rotary-wing aircraft. The Mi-24V, with its combination of speed, agility, and weapons flexibility, turned out to be well-suited for the rotary-wing intercept mission. Operating at low altitudes, faster than the Shahed, with crew trained to use its gun systems against aerial targets, the Hind could engage Shaheds in the flight corridor between their launch points and their targets — a capability that required adapting traditional rotary-wing gunnery techniques to a fundamentally different kind of target than the platform was designed for.

The altitude window and the engagement geometry

The Shahed's altitude window — 100 to 300 meters — places it in what air defense analysts call the "low-level gap": too low for many SAM systems optimized for medium and high altitudes, too high for some ground-based systems, and in a regime where radar coverage is complicated by terrain masking. This gap has been exploited by Russia deliberately: the Shahed's mission profile is specifically designed to minimize its exposure to conventional air defense architectures.

The Mi-24V's ability to operate in this altitude window — to fly at the same level as the threat, to close on it at superior speed, to engage it with guns or unguided rockets — provides a form of intercept capability that complements rather than duplicates the other elements of Ukraine's layered air defense. No single system addresses the Shahed problem completely. The Hind provides one layer: the mobile, flexible, crew-operated layer that can respond to threats that automated systems fail to engage. That layer has value precisely because it is human-controlled, adaptable, and capable of making judgment calls that automated systems cannot.

Unit Topot and the first Orion intercept

September 2025: a milestone in drone warfare

In September 2025, a Ukrainian Mi-24 crew from Unit Topot of the 414th Brigade accomplished something that had not been done before: they intercepted and destroyed a Russian Orion drone in flight. The Orion, as described elsewhere in this publication's coverage, is Russia's most capable UAV — a medium-altitude, long-endurance platform considerably larger, faster, and more capable than the Shahed. Engaging it with a rotary-wing aircraft required approaching a target operating at higher altitude, at a platform that carries electronic countermeasures, and that presents a more challenging engagement geometry than the low-and-slow Shahed profile.

The Unit Topot crew's success was not accidental. It reflected accumulated tactical knowledge — knowledge developed through hundreds of Shahed intercepts, through the gradual development of crew techniques for engaging aerial targets, through the intelligence picture that allowed them to position their aircraft in the Orion's likely flight path, and through the decision to attempt an engagement that most helicopter crews would not have had the doctrine or confidence to attempt. It was a first. Firsts matter in warfare because they establish what is possible and because they become the foundation for doctrine that others can follow.

What the Orion intercept means for air defense doctrine

The intercept of an Orion by a Mi-24 in September 2025 has implications that extend beyond the individual engagement. It demonstrates that rotary-wing platforms, properly employed, can engage medium-altitude reconnaissance-strike drones — a class of threat that sits between the low-altitude Shahed envelope and the high-altitude SAM engagement zone. If Ukrainian crews can intercept Orions with Hinds, the logical next development is a systematic doctrine for using rotary-wing aircraft as part of a layered intercept architecture that addresses threats across the full altitude spectrum that Russian drones operate in.

That doctrine development is underway, though its specific contours are not publicly described in detail. What is visible is that the Mi-24V's role in Ukrainian air defense has expanded beyond its initial Shahed intercept function to include engagement of more capable platforms. The Czech Republic's decision to transfer eight of these aircraft — beginning in May 2022, completing in March 2024 — has contributed to a tactical capability that neither the Czech government nor the Ukrainian military fully anticipated at the time of the first transfer. That is how wartime military innovation works: you provide the tool, and the people using it find applications that the original decision-makers could not have predicted.

Jana Černochová and the decision to send the last two

The political cost of the final transfer

Jana Černochová, Czech Defense Minister since December 2021, has been one of the most consistently pro-Ukraine voices in the Central European defense community. Under her leadership, the Czech Republic has contributed significantly to Ukraine's military capacity: the Mi-24V transfers, the famous Czech ammunition initiative that sourced hundreds of thousands of artillery shells from non-NATO stockpiles, and sustained diplomatic support for Ukraine's accession and financial needs within EU frameworks. Each of these contributions required political courage — the willingness to face domestic criticism, budget pressure, and the institutional inertia of a defense establishment that was not designed for rapid wartime commitments.

The decision to send the final two Mi-24Vs in March 2024 — completing the eight-helicopter commitment — came at a moment when Czech public opinion on Ukraine support was under some pressure from economic concerns and the extended duration of the conflict. Černochová made the decision and announced it clearly. The domestic political management of that decision, the communication to the Czech public about why it was the right choice, and the international signal it sent — that the Czech Republic would complete its commitments even when completing them was not costless — are all part of the political record that she has built on Ukraine.

The replacement calculus: Viper and Venom

The Czech Republic's acquisition of Bell AH-1Z Viper attack helicopters and UH-1Y Venom utility helicopters from the United States to replace the transferred Mi-24Vs represents a significant modernization of Czech rotary-wing capability. The AH-1Z is a state-of-the-art attack helicopter with advanced sensor systems, fire control, and weapons integration that the Mi-24V cannot match. The UH-1Y provides complementary utility capability. Together, they position the Czech Air Force for the next generation of NATO operations — a platform set that is interoperable with US and allied systems, maintainable under NATO logistics frameworks, and capable of the full spectrum of rotary-wing missions.

The transfer of the Mi-24Vs to Ukraine therefore served two strategic purposes simultaneously. For Ukraine: eight additional combat helicopter airframes with crews already partially trained on the type, providing immediate capability enhancement. For the Czech Republic: a funded justification and political momentum for the modernization investment that replaced Soviet-era equipment with NATO-standard platforms. The alignment of these interests — Ukraine's need for Mi-24Vs and the Czech Republic's interest in replacing them — is one of the cleaner examples of how aligned interests can produce decision-making speed that the broader alliance sometimes struggles to generate.

The 155mm ammunition thread

Beyond helicopters: the Czech contribution in full

The Mi-24V transfers are the most visible component of the Czech Republic's contribution to Ukraine's military capacity, but they are not the most consequential in terms of battlefield impact. That distinction belongs to the Czech ammunition initiative — Prime Minister Petr Fiala's 2024 decision to coordinate procurement of 155mm artillery shells from non-NATO sources and route them to Ukraine through a Czech-managed framework. The initiative delivered hundreds of thousands of shells at a moment when Ukraine's artillery was operating under severe supply constraints, and it did so by moving faster than conventional allied procurement frameworks could.

The ammunition and helicopter initiatives share a common DNA: they both reflect a Czech government willing to work outside established frameworks when those frameworks are too slow for the operational need. The NATO procurement system, with its standardization requirements, certification processes, and multi-year lead times, was not designed for wartime urgency. The Czech approach — find the shells, fund the transportation, manage the politics, deliver to Ukraine — operated on a different timeline. The Mi-24V transfers operated on a similarly direct logic: the aircraft exist, Ukraine needs them, the replacement plan is in place, the transfers happen.

What the Czech model suggests for the alliance

The Czech Republic's approach to Ukraine support suggests a model for alliance contribution that other member states have found instructive — if not always easy to replicate. The model has three components: identify what is needed, find what is available, move quickly to connect the two. It requires political leadership willing to act without waiting for full alliance consensus, institutional flexibility to work around standard procurement frameworks, and public communication capable of justifying the choices made. Not every NATO member state has all three components. The Czech Republic, under Fiala and Černochová, has demonstrated that a mid-size member state without the largest defense budget can have outsized strategic impact by combining political will with operational agility.

The Mi-24V's role in this story is, in one sense, modest: eight helicopters, transferred across three years, making a contribution to a conflict that has involved thousands of platforms from dozens of contributors. In another sense, it is emblematic: a Soviet-era machine that outlived its original military context to become a tool of democratic defense, transferred by a post-communist democracy to another democracy fighting for its existence, adapted by creative crews to a mission nobody anticipated, and used to achieve things — including the first rotary-wing intercept of an Orion drone — that the entire chain of decisions that led to its deployment made possible.

The Shahed production scale and what it requires to counter

Russia's drone production ramp-up

The threat that the Mi-24V is helping to address has not remained static. Russia's Shahed production, initially dependent on Iranian supplies and Iranian technical assistance, has been progressively domesticated: Russian factories in Alabuga and elsewhere have begun producing Shahed-equivalent drones at industrial scale, reducing Russia's dependence on Iranian deliveries and increasing the volume of drones available for operations. Independent assessments suggest Russia is now producing several thousand Shahed-equivalent drones per month — a production rate that sustains the large-scale waves that have become Russia's signature form of strategic attack against Ukrainian civilian infrastructure.

The scale of the threat requires a proportionate scale of intercept capacity. Ukraine cannot rely on a small number of Mi-24V helicopters to address a production rate of thousands of drones per month — the rotary-wing intercept mission is one layer in a system that must also include electronic warfare jamming, ground-based gun systems, FPV intercept drones, and whatever SAM coverage can be directed at the low-altitude threat. The Mi-24V's role is not to solve the Shahed problem alone. It is to address the portion of the threat that other systems cannot reach — the gap in the layered defense architecture that rotary-wing capability fills.

The crews who fill the gap

The Ukrainian Mi-24 crews who operate these transferred Czech helicopters in the drone intercept mission are, by any reasonable measure, among the most experienced low-altitude aerial combat specialists in the world. The volume of intercept attempts, the diversity of drone types engaged, the adaptation of doctrine in real time under operational conditions, and the specific challenges of operating in contested airspace at night while managing both the threat and the risk of friendly fire — all of this has produced a level of expertise that no training program can replicate. It can only be built in the field, by doing it, at cost.

Those crews operate aircraft that were transferred because the Czech Republic decided they should be. The decision chain runs from Černochová's office in Prague to the Mi-24V's cockpit over occupied Ukraine — a long chain, but a direct one. The crew sitting in that cockpit on the night of a Shahed intercept is the operational expression of a political choice made in a European capital by a defense minister who decided that Ukraine's defense was worth the cost of the Czech Republic's most capable rotary-wing assets. That is worth naming. The machines do not fly themselves. The decisions that put them in the air were made by people.

The Czech Republic's place in Ukraine's history

What Prague will be remembered for

When the history of Ukraine's defense against Russia's full-scale invasion is written with full access to the operational record, the Czech Republic's contribution will appear in several chapters. The Mi-24V transfers will appear in the chapter on air defense innovation. The ammunition initiative will appear in the chapter on the 2023-2024 ammunition crisis and its resolution. Černochová's consistent advocacy within EU and NATO frameworks will appear in the chapter on Central European leadership. This is not a country that performed at the margins of the coalition. It is a country that found specific moments of maximum leverage and applied its resources precisely there.

There is a particular resonance in this contribution for a country whose own history includes the 1968 Soviet invasion — when Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into Czechoslovak cities to suppress a reform movement that Moscow found threatening. The Czech Republic now sends helicopters that were built by the country that invaded it to the country that is fighting that country's successor state. That historical circuit is not lost on Czech politicians or Czech public opinion. It gives the contribution a moral weight that transcends the military calculus — a sense that the Czech Republic is, in supporting Ukraine, also vindicating something about its own past and its own values.

The relationship that this builds

Military cooperation of this depth and consistency builds relationships that outlast the specific transactions. Ukraine will remember, with specificity and gratitude, which countries sent what, when, and at what political cost. The Czech Republic's place in that memory — as an early mover on helicopter transfers, as the architect of the ammunition initiative, as a consistent diplomatic voice for Ukraine in European forums — is secure. What that memory means for the Czech-Ukrainian relationship in the postwar context — in the EU accession negotiations, in the reconstruction investment, in the security partnership that will define Central Europe's architecture for a generation — is not yet written. But it will be shaped by the decisions made now, including the decision to send the final two Mi-24Vs in March 2024.

The Crocodile has done its work. It has done work its makers never imagined. It has done work that the Czech crews who once flew it probably did not anticipate when they agreed to transfer it. And it has done that work because a chain of human decisions — from the designers at Mil who built it, to the Czech government that decided to send it, to the Ukrainian pilots who found new uses for it — each made their specific contribution to an outcome that none of them could have fully predicted. That is how history works. Not through single decisive moments, but through the accumulation of decisions, each made under uncertainty, each adding a strand to a web of consequence that only becomes visible in retrospect.

What the drone intercept mission requires of you now

The tactical evolution continues

Dear Crocodile, the war you are operating in does not respect your age. The threats you are now intercepting — Shaheds, Orlans, Orions — are products of the same industrial-military logic that produced you: the logic that says a weapon system that addresses a specific operational need is worth building and deploying, regardless of how unconventional the application. You are the product of that logic. The drones you hunt are also the products of that logic. The contest between them is, at a technical level, a contest between different expressions of the same fundamental reality: war requires tools, and tools are made by human decisions.

The crews flying you have made you something new. They have taken a platform designed to escort troop transports and engage ground armor and made it a component of a layered drone intercept system that did not exist three years ago. They have built doctrine on the fly — in the literal sense — through operational experience that cannot be found in any training manual. The Unit Topot crew that intercepted the Orion in September 2025 did not have a reference document for how to do what they did. They did it because the opportunity presented itself and because they had developed, through hundreds of hours of Shahed intercepts, the skills and the confidence to attempt it.

What comes after

The Bell AH-1Z Vipers that will eventually replace you in Czech service are capable of things you are not. They carry advanced fire control systems, they are integrated with NATO logistics frameworks, and they represent the future of Czech air power in the most literal sense. But they will not be in Ukraine. You are. And the lessons that your Ukrainian crews have developed — the doctrine for rotary-wing drone intercept, the techniques for operating in contested low-altitude airspace, the crew coordination procedures for engaging aerial targets at night — will not transfer to any training manual automatically. They will need to be documented, analyzed, and institutionalized before they can be taught to others. That institutionalization is, perhaps, one of the most important contributions that Ukraine's military experience will make to NATO's collective understanding of how to fight in the drone-saturated environment that the next conflict will also feature.

You are old, Crocodile. You were designed for a war that ended before most of the crews flying you were born. And yet here you are, over the skies of occupied Ukraine, hunting machines that your designers would not have recognized as threats, doing things that nobody trained you to do, keeping the people on the ground below you safer than they would be without you. That is not a small thing. That is, in fact, exactly what a good tool does: it serves the need that presents itself, not the need that was anticipated when it was made. You have done that. The Czech Republic that sent you, and the Ukrainian crews who found your new purpose, deserve credit for making sure you could.

The broader meaning: weapon transfer as moral act

What it means to send weapons to Ukraine

There has been an ongoing debate in European public discourse about the morality of sending weapons to a country at war. The debate is genuine — there are serious people who hold the position that weapons deliveries prolong conflict rather than preventing suffering, and their arguments deserve engagement rather than dismissal. The counterfactual — what Ukraine's situation would be without Western weapons deliveries — is not available to us. We cannot know what peace would have looked like if the West had refused to provide military support in February and March 2022.

What we can observe is what the absence of sufficient weapons would have meant: the fall of Kyiv, the installation of a Russian-controlled government, the occupation of Ukrainian territory at a scale even larger than the current situation, and the destruction of the democratic experiment that Ukraine represents. Against that counterfactual, the case for weapons transfer — including eight Czech Mi-24Vs — is strong. The weapons did not create the war. Russia created the war. The weapons gave Ukraine the capacity to resist it. The moral weight of that choice falls on the Czech government that made it, and it falls on the right side of history.

The record that the Mi-24V writes

When the war ends — in whatever form, at whatever point — the Mi-24V's record in Ukrainian service will be part of the operational history that analysts, historians, and military planners study. They will study the Shahed intercept doctrine that Ukrainian crews developed. They will study the Orion intercept of September 2025. They will study the role of Soviet-era rotary-wing platforms in a conflict defined by drone warfare. They will note the Czech Republic's decision to transfer them, Černochová's role in completing the commitment, and the way that a machine designed in the 1960s contributed to the defense of a democracy fighting for its existence in 2022-2026.

That record is being written now. The Mi-24V is still flying. The crews are still operating. The drones they intercept are still being launched. The war that brought all of these things together has not yet concluded. But the record is accumulating, decision by decision, intercept by intercept, transfer by transfer. The Crocodile has been faithful to the purpose it was given — not the original purpose its makers intended, but the purpose its operators found for it. That faithfulness is not nothing. In a war where every asset matters and every decision has consequences, the machine that does what it is needed to do, in conditions it was not designed for, is a kind of quiet triumph of human ingenuity over the limitations of design.

What I ask of you now

A request to a machine, and to the people behind it

This is where an open letter reaches its formal limit. I cannot ask a helicopter to do anything. Machines do not receive requests; they receive commands from the crews who operate them and the maintenance teams who keep them flyable. So let me be explicit about what I am actually asking. To the Ukrainian crews flying Czech Mi-24Vs: your work is seen and documented. The tactical knowledge you have built — the drone intercept doctrine, the Orion engagement protocols, the low-altitude night operations in contested airspace — is too valuable to remain undocumented. Find the ways, within operational security constraints, to share what you have learned with the broader community of practitioners who will face similar threats. What you know is a contribution to a problem that extends beyond this war.

To the Czech Republic: you have made your contribution to Ukraine's defense. The eight Mi-24Vs, the ammunition initiative, the consistent diplomatic support — these are in the record. The request is not for more of the same but for something harder: maintain the political will as the war extends, as the domestic costs accumulate, as the fatigue that affects every allied government in prolonged conflicts begins to affect yours. The contribution you have made is valuable precisely because it has been consistent. Consistency under pressure is what allies are for. Continue to be that.

The Czech Mi-24V in the history of wartime ingenuity

Machines repurposed by necessity

Military history is full of examples of weapons systems deployed in roles their designers did not intend. The M4 Sherman tank, designed for breakthrough operations, became a platform for close infantry support after it proved insufficient against German armor. The P-47 Thunderbolt, designed as an air superiority fighter, became the most effective ground attack aircraft in the European theater. The B-52 Stratofortress, designed for nuclear bombing, became a conventional close air support platform over Vietnam and has continued in that role for sixty years. The Mi-24V, designed to escort Soviet motorized infantry, has become a drone hunter over Ukrainian skies.

What these examples share is the operational logic of adaptation: the battlefield presents a need, the available resources are assessed, and the gap between design intent and operational requirement is bridged by the ingenuity and experience of the crews who operate the platform. This process is not always successful — some platforms cannot be adapted to requirements beyond their design limits, and the attempt to do so produces neither good results nor good platforms. The Mi-24V's adaptation to the drone intercept mission has, evidently, been successful. The Unit Topot Orion intercept is proof. The ongoing Shahed intercept operations are proof. The platform has met the operational requirement, even one its designers could not have imagined.

The institutional lesson

The institutional lesson from the Mi-24V's Ukrainian deployment is one that NATO member states would do well to absorb as they assess their own contributions to Ukraine's defense and their own preparations for the security environment that Ukraine's conflict is revealing. The lesson is not that Soviet-era equipment is surprisingly effective — that is a tactical observation, not a strategic one. The lesson is that the combination of political will (the Czech decision to transfer), operational creativity (Ukrainian crew doctrine development), and time (three years of combat experience) can produce capability outcomes that no pre-conflict assessment would have predicted.

The implication for alliance decision-making is significant: transfers that seem marginal at the time of commitment — eight old helicopters, some surplus ammunition — can become strategically significant when they are received by a military that has the will, the skill, and the operational context to use them to their maximum potential. The Czech Republic committed to the Mi-24V transfers in a context where their precise operational impact could not be known. The result has exceeded what was anticipated. That outcome is a reason to maintain the principle of support under uncertainty: commit what is available, trust the recipients to find the best use for it, and let the operational record speak for itself. The Crocodile has spoken. Clearly.

The airspace they defend: what is below the flight path

Cities in the drone's shadow

The Mi-24V's drone intercept missions do not take place in abstract airspace. They take place above specific cities, specific infrastructure corridors, specific civilian populations who are the intended targets of the Shahed waves that the Hind and its crew are trying to intercept. When a Ukrainian Mi-24 crew engages a Shahed inbound toward Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, or Odesa, the stakes of their success or failure are visible from the ground: the infrastructure that is not hit, the people who sleep through the night, the power that stays on for one more day. The machine and the crew are the barrier between the weapon and its intended target. That is a specific and concrete responsibility.

The populations of Ukrainian cities who have lived under drone and missile attack for years have developed an intimate familiarity with the sounds and patterns of air defense operations. The rotor noise of a Mi-24 working a low-altitude intercept corridor is, to a Ukrainian civilian who has spent three years sleeping through air raid alerts, a sound associated with protection. That association — between the Soviet-era helicopter and the safety of the people it is defending — would have been incomprehensible to the engineers who designed the aircraft to enforce Soviet military power. History is full of these reversals. This one is among the more poignant.

The invisible work of defense

Most of what air defense does is invisible to the people it protects. The drone that is intercepted fifty kilometers from a city is never seen by the city's residents. The alert that is triggered and then lifted, the all-clear that follows an interception sequence, the morning when the power grid is intact and the water is running and the school opens on time — all of these outcomes are the product of decisions and actions that the protected population largely does not witness. The Mi-24V's most successful operations are the ones that produce nothing visible from the ground: no explosion in the city, no damage to the grid, no casualties in the hospital.

That invisibility is worth acknowledging because it makes the work harder to sustain politically and institutionally. It is easier to secure continued support for capabilities whose contributions are dramatic and visible. The drone intercepted forty kilometers out, the power plant that is not struck, the children who go to school because the grid held — these are real outcomes, but they are outcomes defined by absence, and absence is harder to communicate than wreckage. The Ukrainian air defense community, including the Mi-24 crews, does work whose success is measured in things that did not happen. The record of those non-events is as real as the record of the intercepts that can be filmed and documented.

The maintenance crews and the infrastructure of resilience

What keeps the Crocodile flying

An open letter to a helicopter cannot ignore the people who keep it airworthy. The Mi-24V's operational record in Ukraine would not exist without the maintenance crews, logistics specialists, and technical support personnel who service the aircraft, source spare parts, repair battle damage, and keep a Soviet-era machine flying in a wartime environment that is not kind to complex mechanical systems. The Mi-24V's maintenance requirements are substantial — it is a hydraulically intensive aircraft with demanding turboshaft engines and a rotor system that requires careful inspection and regular adjustment.

Ukraine's ability to maintain transferred Soviet-era equipment has been one of the less-publicized but genuinely impressive aspects of its wartime military management. The technical knowledge base from the Soviet period — the engineers, the maintenance manuals, the spare parts supply chains — has been adapted, improvised, and extended to keep platforms like the Mi-24V operational at a pace that Western assessments often underestimated. Spare parts have been sourced from multiple countries, including from other former Warsaw Pact states that still hold stocks. Locally manufactured components have supplemented or replaced unavailable originals. The result is an aircraft that has continued to fly and fight years beyond what a strict accounting of available parts might have suggested was possible.

The resilience of distributed maintenance

Ukraine's maintenance approach for its transferred equipment reflects a deliberate decentralization strategy: rather than concentrating maintenance at large facilities that would be attractive targets for Russian strikes, the system distributes maintenance capacity across multiple smaller facilities, using mobile teams and pre-positioned spare parts caches to service aircraft as close to their operating areas as possible. This approach is less efficient in peacetime terms — it cannot achieve the economies of scale of a centralized depot — but it is considerably more resilient to the kind of strike targeting that Russia has applied to Ukrainian military infrastructure.

The Mi-24Vs transferred from the Czech Republic have benefited from this distributed maintenance approach. The Czech aircraft arrived with maintenance documentation, initial spare parts provisions, and in some cases Czech technical advisors who supported the initial integration period. Ukrainian technical teams then absorbed the knowledge, adapted their procedures, and assumed full maintenance responsibility. The transition from Czech to Ukrainian maintenance management is itself a form of capacity transfer — one that leaves Ukraine with deepened technical expertise that has applications beyond the specific Mi-24V fleet.

Conclusion: What you have done is enough to be proud of

A final word to the Crocodile

Dear Mi-24V. You have been flying for Ukraine since May 2022. You have intercepted drones that your designers did not know would exist. You have been crewed by pilots who learned on the job, in conditions that no training program could fully prepare them for, achieving results that nobody anticipated when the Czech Republic's defense minister decided to complete the transfer protocol. You are an old machine that found a new purpose. That is not a comfortable thing to be — it requires adaptation from everyone around you, and it produces uncertainty that more conventional deployment does not. You have handled it.

I do not know how long you will continue to fly. I do not know what the war's next phase holds for you or for the crews who operate you. What I know is that what you have already done — the Shahed intercepts, the Orion engagement, the contribution to a layered air defense system that protects Ukrainian cities from nightly bombardment — is real and documented and matters. The Czech Republic gave you to Ukraine. Ukraine found your purpose. The Crocodile hunted. In the history of this war, that is a sentence that will stand.

For the record

This open letter is addressed to a machine, but it is really addressed to the decisions that put the machine where it is. The decision by Jana Černochová to complete the transfer. The decision by the Ukrainian military to adapt the Mi-24V to the drone intercept mission. The decision by the Unit Topot crew to attempt the Orion engagement in September 2025. The decision by the Czech Republic to absorb the political cost of being an early and consistent contributor to Ukraine's defense. These decisions made the story. The Mi-24V is how the story became visible. This letter is the acknowledgment that the story was seen.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Columnist's transparency note

On the open letter format and its limitations

The open letter format is an unusual choice for a piece of military analysis. I chose it because the Mi-24V's story involves a specific combination of political decision, technical adaptation, and operational achievement that I wanted to approach with a different angle than standard analytical prose would provide. The format is a stylistic choice, not a claim that the helicopter has any awareness of what I have written. All operational details — the transfer dates, the numbers of aircraft, Černochová's confirmation, the Unit Topot intercept, the Shahed's altitude and speed parameters — are drawn from publicly available reporting and should be independently verifiable.

On perspective and limits

I write from a perspective that is explicitly supportive of Ukraine's defense and appreciative of the Czech Republic's contribution. I am not a military aviation specialist — my descriptions of the Mi-24V's technical characteristics are drawn from open-source documentation, not from primary expertise. The operational details of Ukrainian Mi-24 missions are necessarily limited by operational security constraints. I have not embellished or invented operational claims beyond what is publicly reported.

Sources

Primary sources

Defence Ukraine — News and analysis

Militarnyi — Czech Republic to hand over attack helicopters and artillery shells to Ukraine

Kyiv Independent — Czechia sent Ukraine coverage

Secondary sources

Ukrainska Pravda — July 2, 2026

Euromaidan Press — Ukraine news coverage

Ukrainska Pravda — July 2, 2026, second reference