Tuesday 15 November 2022 01:35 PM Inside the world's longest-range sniper kills as Ukraine claims second spot trends now
In an age of drones and precision guided missiles they are some of war's last living legends: Snipers, the silent assassins capable of killing with a single bullet over extraordinary distances.
Ukraine claims one of its sharpshooters has just notched up the second-longest ranged kill on record at 8,891ft - equivalent to just over three times the height of Burj Khalifa, world's tallest building, or 35 New York City blocks.
But even that is dwarfed by the world record, held by an unnamed Canadian, at 11,319ft - which would be the same as taking out someone on the platform of London's Liverpool Street Station from the top of Big Ben.
As with all things, technology now plays a part - snipers use wind meters, laser rangefinders and advanced scopes to make their kills. But, in a world where some of the deadliest troops use video game controllers to blow out figures on a screen, the skill of the sharpshooter still comes down to one person, with one rifle, and one bullet.
And it is a skill they have honed into a deadly and precise science - taking into account everything from temperature to humidity and even the curvature and rotation of the earth - to find their targets.
Ukraine has claimed the second-longest ranged sniper kill on record, saying one of its sharpshooters took out a Russian soldier at 8,891ft - beating Briton Craig Harrison but still well behind an unnamed Canadian who managed 11,319ft
Ukraine released footage the military suggested showed the record-breaking shot, but has given almost no other details about it making the kill extremely hard to verify
Briton Craig Harrison, a sergeant who served with the Blues and Royals in Afghanistan, held the record for the longest confirmed kill from 2009 to 2017 and is the only sniper among that elite club to talk about his experience.
Sgt. Harrison told how he was driven to take the shot while fighting in Helmand province in 2009, when a patrol he was part of came under fire from Taliban fighters.
During a three-hour shooting match, Sgt. Harrison recalled seeing his friends get stuck in a gulley under heavy fire from a Taliban machine gun that he could see - though the target was well outside his rifle's effective range.
Conditions that day were perfect for long-range shooting: No wind, mild weather, and clear visibility. With eight men at risk of being wounded or killed if he didn't do anything, Sgt. Harrison decided to give it a crack.
After running his calculations, Sgt. Harrison aimed his L115A3 and opened fire - waiting six long seconds to find out if he was right.
He wasn't. The first bullet missed but the Taliban fighters heard it whistle past and broke off their attack to try and work out where it had come from - though, at that distance, it would have been hard to spot Sgt. Harrison even if he had been standing upright.
Making some corrections, he opened fire a second time and after another agonising wait saw one of the jihadists slump to the floor. He was hit by a burst of adrenaline but knew he needed to take out the second man or else the patrol could still be slaughtered.
Somehow, Sgt. Harrison repeated the impossible: Two more shots, and the second fighter was down. The patrol was safe. Later, an Apache helicopter with a rangefinder was sent up over his firing position to measure the distance to the target and came up with 8,120ft - the longest ever confirmed kill at that time.
It was a record that Sgt. Harrison would hold until 2017, when a Canadian
