“God is not on the side of the big battalions, but on the side of those who shoot best.” — Voltaire (French writer and philosopher), 1694-1778.
On Thursday, August 14, 2025, the day before the recent, Trump-Putin summit in Alaska, a Ukrainian sniper assigned to the elite, Pryvyd (“Ghost”) special operations unit at the front lines in the Pokrovsk-Myrnohrad region made two incredible, artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted, combat kills with a single bullet, from an astounding 4,000 meters (4,400 yards, exactly 2.5 miles), using a Ukrainian-made, XADO Snipex Alligator rifle in 14.5x114mm, with an AI aiming device and camera attached.
This remarkable feat overshadows the previous, world-record, combat sniper kills at 3,800 meters (2.36 miles), set by Ukrainian sniper Viacheslav Kovalskiy, age 58, on November 18, 2023, using a MAYAK Volodar Obriyu (“Horizon’s Lord”), bolt-action, single-shot, anti-matériel rifle in 12.7x114mm HL near Kherson, Ukraine.
In this latest case, a two-man Ukrainian sniper team operating from a concealed position was coordinating with a reconnaissance drone equipped with AI telemetry sensors. According to the Ukrainian media, the drone relayed visual data to the rifle’s AI fire-control system, which automatically calculated target distance, wind speed and direction, and other variables. This was an indirect-fire system, in which the shooter never actually saw his targets with his own eyes. All data was relayed electronically.
The shooting sequence was recorded on a 30-second video clip, shared on social media, in which the Ukrainian Pryvyd sniper took at least five shots at a distant structure housing Russian soldiers, with his final shot striking a window and killing two Russian troops inside. This double-kill feat has been called a “Quigley,” ever since the 1990 Western film “Quigley Down Under,” starring Tom Selleck as an American cowboy sharpshooter, Matthew Quigley (from Wyoming), in Australia, where he dropped two of the evil villain’s henchmen with a single shot from an awe-inspiring distance.
The Snipex Alligator was introduced in 2020, and officially adopted for military service on March 2, 2021, less than a year before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It scored a near-record kill in November 2022, at a range of 2,710 meters, and it’s a bolt-action, magazine-fed, anti-matériel rifle chambered in 14.5x114mm, with a five-round magazine. The weapon is 6.6 feet long, even without a suppressor, and weighs a hefty 55 pounds. It has an effective firing range of 2,000 meters, but this double kill took place at twice that distance!
Ukrainian troops in the Pokrovsk-Myrnohrad region are currently surrounded on three sides by an estimated 110,000 Russian forces, so this is the scene of some of the most intense fighting the embattled nation, and this ultra-long-range shot was reportedly “taken from behind the lines,” making the mysterious circumstances even more dramatic.
At any given time and place, Ukrainian troops remain outnumbered four-to-one by hostile Russian forces, so they must offset the enemy’s numerical superiority with innovation, technological superiority, and bold, aggressive combat tactics. The courageous and highly resourceful Ukrainians have, of necessity, become the absolute masters of global drone technology, incorporating advanced AI techniques into their drones and into the latest rifle scopes, as well.
War correspondent Kathrine Frich just wrote for the Dagens news outlet that this world-record, sniper shot “marks a milestone in the evolution of modern warfare,” and Ukraine’s Special Forces units added that their snipers are “rewriting the rules of global sniping,” using state-of-the-art, Ukrainian-made weapons. In the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, Pryvyd unit snipers have scored more than 1,000 combat kills over the past year alone, so they are certainly achieving spectacular results.
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