Russia yesterday said that an IL-76 military transport plane carrying 65 Ukrainian prisoners had crashed in the western Belgorod region, bordering Ukraine, killing everyone on board.
Unverified videos on social media showed a large plane, purportedly in the Belgorod region, falling from the sky on its side before crashing in a fireball.
The Russian Ministry of Defense said the plane had crashed at about 8am “during a routine flight.”
Photo: AP
“On board were 65 captured Ukrainian army servicemen being transported to the Belgorod region for exchange, six crew members and three escorts,” it added.
Vyacheslav Volodin, the top lawmaker in Russia’s lower house of parliament, said the plane had been shot down by Kyiv and blamed Western missiles.
“They shot their own soldiers in the air. Their own,” Volodin told lawmakers in a plenary session. “Our pilots, who were carrying out a humanitarian mission, were shot down.”
The crash occurred in the Korochansky district, northeast of the region’s capital, Belgorod Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov wrote on social media.
“Everyone on board died,” he added in a later post.
He said the plane had crashed in a field and the area had been closed off while investigators and emergency services worked at the scene.
Agence France-Presse was not able to immediately verify Russia’s claims.
In Kyiv, local media initially cited sources in the Ukrainian security services as saying that its army had downed the plane, and that it was transporting missiles, but media outlets later retracted the claim.
Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights Dmytro Lubinets, who is among officials responsible for prison exchanges, later said his office was probing the incident.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov declined to comment, saying news around the crash was still emerging, but said that Russian authorities would “look into” the incident.
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