22-05-2025
WATCH: NATO Apaches Loaded With Hellfire Missiles Fire Near Russian Border
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content.
British soldiers have fired U.S. Hellfire missiles from American-made Apache helicopters in NATO drills just 60 miles away from the alliance's northern border with Russia.
Two of the missiles were loaded on Thursday onto one of the recently received Apache attack helicopters on the ground at Sodankylä, a military base north of the Arctic Circle line in Finland's Lapland region.
The Apache crews fired a total of 15 Hellfire missiles, including eight on Thursday, in drills crafted to get a feel for how the new and improved helicopters worked with the short-range missiles—plus the 30 mm chain gun—on targets just south of the airstrip. The 50-kilogram Hellfire missiles are small but pack quite a punch, designed to take out targets like enemy tanks.
The Apache and Hellfire exercises are part of NATO training in the northernmost region of Finland, largely led by the Finnish military but beefed up by Swedish and British troops.
British Army soldiers pick up a Hellfire missile to load onto a new Apache attack helicopter for military drills in the Arctic Circle in Sodankylä, northern Finland, on May 22, 2025.
British Army soldiers pick up a Hellfire missile to load onto a new Apache attack helicopter for military drills in the Arctic Circle in Sodankylä, northern Finland, on May 22, 2025.
Ellie Cook
Finland and Sweden are NATO's newest members, with the live-fire drills rolled out in the austere conditions of training grounds. The soldiers in Sodankylä say they are aware of the proximity to Russian soil, but it is a thought mostly set aside for the exercises.
Helsinki's accession to the alliance doubled Russia's land border with NATO, and the Kremlin quickly vowed to respond. Moscow previously committed to building up its presence in northwestern Russia.
Recent satellite images have confirmed that Russia is expanding its military footprint close to Finland, although officials from NATO states bordering Russian territory have long said they expected Moscow to send significant numbers of troops near NATO land when the war with Ukraine ends.
U.S. President Donald Trump and his senior officials have exerted significant pressure on Kyiv and Moscow to negotiate and stop Europe's largest land conflict since World War II—a feat Trump pledged to achieve in just 24 hours once he returned to the Oval Office in January. Progress toward a ceasefire has been sluggish, with the White House growing increasingly frustrated with Russian reluctance to ink a deal.
Military personnel in northern Finland paint Russia as a real but long-established threat.
"We have been neighbors of Russia for many hundreds of years," Major General Sami Nurmi, the chief of strategic planning for the Finnish Defense Forces, said this week. "We have learned to live with it."
But Estonia's foreign intelligence service warned early last year that NATO "could face a Soviet-style mass army in the next decade" if Russia successfully reforms its military. Former Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced sweeping changes to the military in late 2022 that are now underway.
Other assessments have deemed a Russian attack on NATO more likely after pulling out of Ukraine if the alliance is seen as divided. Trump, a NATO skeptic, said before he swept back into the White House that he would encourage Russia to attack NATO members that he said fell short of guidelines for defense spending across the alliance, slashing at NATO solidarity.
The exercises in northern Finland seem crafted to emphasize the opposite—to show NATO's newest inductees slotting in seamlessly.
"This is a really obvious demonstration of how NATO capability can come to Finland," Brigadier Nick English, commander of the British Army's 1st Aviation Brigade Combat Team, told Newsweek on Wednesday.
Not least for the Brits, it's also about acclimatizing to difficult conditions.
"The Arctic is about as adverse as it gets—it can go from perfectly lovely to it will kill you, if you're not careful," said Lance Corporal Jamie Price with the 4th Regiment Army Air Corps deployed in Sodankylä.
The Apache has "always been very effective as an attack platform," Price told Newsweek. The helicopter, able to lock onto and fire on multiple targets at once, is crafted to quickly get to where it is needed, before zipping away shortly after its work is done, added Molly Mclelland, a 19-year-old air trooper working in communications with the Air Corps.
The British military received the last of its 50 upgraded AH-64E helicopters in March.
