The treeline is close enough to count individual trees. The horizon sits high in the windscreen, the ground blurring past in green streaks, and somewhere ahead a small jet-powered cruise missile is running for a Ukrainian city at roughly the speed of an airliner.

The pilot of a Ukrainian MiG-29 has a few seconds to choose. Break away and let the missile go, or take a shot so low that his own weapon has almost no room to work. He takes the shot — and he takes it with an R-60, a stubby infrared missile that entered Soviet service in late 1973.

Footage of the interception was published on 2 September 2026 by Sonyashnyk, a Telegram channel affiliated with Ukraine’s Air Force, and reported by the Ukrainian defence outlet Militarnyi. The channel said the aircraft was a modernised MiG-29MU1 flying an air-defence mission, and that the target was a Russian S8000 Banderol.

A missile from 1973 against a target from 2026

The R-60 was designed for a completely different war. It is one of the lightest air-to-air missiles ever fielded, a short-ranged dogfighting weapon meant to be flung at a manoeuvring fighter from close behind, guided by an infrared seeker that homes on hot engine exhaust.

By February 2022 the Ukrainian Air Force considered it obsolete. The newer R-73 was better in almost every respect, and there were enough of them. What changed is arithmetic: years of shooting down cruise missiles and Shahed-type attack drones burned through the modern stock far faster than anyone could replace it. The old missiles came back off the shelf because the new ones ran out.

Firing any air-launched weapon at very low altitude compresses every margin at once. The seeker needs to see the target against a cluttered, sun-warmed ground rather than clean sky. The missile needs time and space to arm and steer. And the launching aircraft is manoeuvring hard, close to terrain, with no altitude to trade for recovery.

What the Banderol actually is

The S8000 Banderol is not a Kalibr. It is deliberately cheap. Ukrainian military intelligence revealed the weapon in May 2025, and analysts who examined recovered wreckage found a design built around commercially available parts, including imported components that had no business being in a cruise missile.

The name translates roughly as “parcel”. It is small, jet-powered, and reportedly more agile than Russia’s older cruise missiles — agility being useful for flying profiles that complicate a ground-based air-defence intercept. Its primary launch platform is the Kronshtadt Orion drone, and it has also been associated with the Mi-28 helicopter.

Its weakness, from a fighter pilot’s point of view, is that it is slow. At a maximum of roughly 650 km/h it is comfortably subsonic — slower than the MiG-29 hunting it, and carrying a hot little turbojet that an infrared seeker can find. That combination is exactly what makes a 1970s dogfighting missile viable against it.

Why old missiles are coming back

Ukraine has been openly working on getting more out of its Soviet-era stockpile. In November 2025, Ihor Fedirko, executive director of the Ukrainian Council of Defense Industry, described work to modernise R-60 variants and adapt them for launch from ground-based systems, replacing analogue components with digital ones to sharpen those ageing infrared seekers. He framed it as a temporary measure — a way to make otherwise unusable missiles useful again rather than a long-term plan.

That is the real story behind the video. A modernised Cold War fighter, flying an air-defence mission it was never designed for, using a missile older than the pilot, against a cheap drone-launched cruise missile assembled partly from commercial parts. Neither side is fighting the war its equipment was built for.

The footage below shows the intercept, filmed from the MiG-29’s cockpit.

Sources: Militarnyi; Sonyashnyk Telegram channel; Ukrainian Main Directorate of Intelligence via The War Zone and Janes; Kyiv Post.