“THIS IS FOR OUR BOYS” WERE THIS PILOT’S LAST WORDS

Roman Nikolayevich Filipov was a Russian military pilot who was shot down over Syria on 3 February 2018 and died a hero’s death.

The guards major was flying his SU-25 ground attack aircraft on a routine mission over the Idlib area, together with his wingman. He had gone into a dive for a low-level attack and was pulling the jet back up when an enemy anti-aircraft missile hit him.

The aircraft went down into a rock formation, but Filipov had ejected moments earlier and still had radio contact with the Russian base. When fighters of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham militia, an al-Qaeda offshoot, closed in on his landing site, he defended himself with his machine pistol. The pilot reported killing two of them and was then badly wounded himself as the fight went on. With 17 years of service behind him, he had a fairly clear picture of what capture by terrorists would mean, and he decided it would not come to that. Down to roughly one magazine for his Stechkin APS (a pistol for self-defense), he readied a hand grenade, waited until the insurgents were almost on top of him and blew himself up. Shortly before his death, on an unconfirmed video recording, the call “This is for our boys” can be heard.Syrian army special forces recovered his body with support from the Russian air force and handed it over to his comrades. Guards Major Filipov was posthumously named a Hero of the Russian Federation and buried in Voronezh in south-western Russia. Around 30,000 people came to his funeral.

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