This article, authored by Harold Hutchison is republished under the Creative Commons “CC BY-NC-ND” license with permission from The Daily Caller News Foundation.
It goes without saying that training with firearms is an activity that requires a lot of effort into ensuring safety, because you never know what might happen.
Take this viral social media video, which has garnered over 16 million views since it was posted Sunday by the Special Khersion Cat account. It starts with a pair of soldiers getting in some range time with a Yakushev-Borzov Yak-B 12.7×108 millimeter Gatling gun.
Russian mobile fire group training goes wrong while using a YakB-12.7 rotary machine gun developed for a Mi-24 helicopter mount
— Special Kherson Cat ??? (@bayraktar_1love) July 12, 2026
This is what happens when an aircraft rotary gun with brutal angular recoil is treated like a regular ground weapon.
They ignored that fact, slapped… https://t.co/bA51ppaKua pic.twitter.com/jwqMmInOLL
Now, this is a gun that is out of its normal habitat – it was initially designed for use on the Mi-24/Mi-25/Mi-35 Hind helicopter gunship, starting with the Mi-24D version, according to WeaponSystems.net. In this case, it is intended to serve as a counter-drone weapon, particularly for use by Russia against Ukrainian one-way drones that have bedeviled Russian forces since the February 2022 invasion.
It’s not a bad choice, given that the Yak-B fires up to 5,000 rounds a minute, and the ammo it fires is plentiful around the globe. Compared to using a missile, it’s a lot more cost-effective. Another video from November 2024, shows how such a mount is intended to work.
So, we are not talking about a bad trainer here. In fact, the trainer seems to be competent, and the gun’s pointed in a safe direction. There’s just one problem – in this case, the jury-rigged mount isn’t done right.
The result is that when the trainee fires, he goes for a ride – he’s actually hanging on for dear life for a few seconds, with the gun spewing 12.7mm death as it does a full 360 until the guy can’t hang on any longer and lets go, which releases the trigger and the gun stops firing.
The trainer ducks, just in time to avoid becoming a cloud of red mist, before he stops the gun’s spinning by grabbing the barrel and getting it pointed back in a safe direction. It’s a very close call that has gone viral – but this could have been a lot worse.
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