Leandro Higo vs. Nikita Mikhailov Among 5 Fights Added to Bellator 298 Billing

🚨 𝗡𝗘𝗪 𝗙𝗜𝗚𝗛𝗧𝗦 🚨

Sioux Falls, we're coming in hot on Friday, August 11th!

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✅ Nikita Mikhailov vs. Leandro Higo
✅ Diana Avsaragova vs. Justine Kish#Bellator298 tickets on sale NOW 👉🎟 https://t.co/A0jjLIKwTw pic.twitter.com/Ouf0bsUjzn

— Bellator MMA (@BellatorMMA) June 22, 2023

Bellator MMA has added a slew of new fights to its August card, including a rescheduled bantamweight battle.

Per Bellator on Thursday via press release, five new fights have been added to the Bellator 298 lineup. This event on Aug. 11 will be held at the Sanford Pentagon in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and its headliner of Logan Storley vs. Brennan Ward is still on track. The league also announced that the start time would be pushed to 10 p.m. ET/7 p.m. PT instead of 9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT, and the prelims are slated to kick off at 5:30 p.m. ET/2:30 p.m. PT earlier that day. Of those five matchups, three contain combatants placed on the Bellator rankings.

All five of the matches will be held on the prelim card, and the bout with the highest billing comes at 135 pounds. Both Leandro Higo (21-6) and Nikita Mikhailov (9-2) had expected to square off at Bellator 297 in June, but Mikhailov fell ill and the promotion bumped the pairing back two months. Higo is looking to get back on track from a quarterfinals loss to Danny Sabatello one year ago, while Mikhailov is attempting to springboard his momentum of a win over former champ Darrion Caldwell into a larger opportunity.

The other four matchups are as follows: a women’s flyweight scrap pitting unbeaten Diana Avsaragova (6-0) against Ultimate Fighting Championship vet Justine Kish (8-6), a featherweight tilt when Dana White's Contender Series contestant Dayana Silva (10-8) faces off against Ukrainian submission specialist Katerina Shakalova (7-1), a lightweight contest between onetime UFC fighter Max Rohskopf (7-2) and Rio de Janeiro native Jairo Pacheco (7-1) and a 135-pound affair as “Thundercat” Jerrell Hodge (10-3) takes on knockout artist Marcirley Alves da Silva (11-3). Additionally, a featherweight contest between Akhmed Magomedov and Kai Kamaka III has been removed from the lineup, but it is not clear at this point whether it has been canceled outright or if it will be postponed to a later date.