As of: January 26, 2024, 11:18 a.m
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There are still many uncertainties about the crashed plane.
Ukraine and Russia accuse each other of being responsible.
Kiev – After the plane crash over Belgorod, Russia and Ukraine blame each other.
According to Russian information, everyone on board was killed - including at least 65 prisoners of war from Ukraine.
Ukraine has not confirmed whether prisoners of war were on board.
It also did not directly confirm that it shot down the Ilyushin Il-76 transport plane that crashed on Wednesday in Russia's Belgorod region, north of the Ukrainian border.
Plane crash in Russia during the Ukraine War: What is known about prisoners of war and missiles
However, in their statements about the incident, senior Ukrainian officials, including President Volodymyr Zelensky, did not deny that the plane was shot down.
Some stressed Ukraine's right - and need - to target Russian military aircraft, given Moscow's ongoing invasion, constant airstrikes on Ukrainian cities and push to take more territory.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
© Ukraine Presidency/Imago
Zelensky said on Wednesday evening that he would insist on an international investigation.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov responded with biting irony and accused Kiev of killing its own soldiers.
He called the downing of the plane an "outrageous act ... incomprehensible" and said Moscow would welcome an international investigation.
“If he means an international investigation into the criminal actions of the Kiev regime, then it is definitely necessary,” Peskov told reporters.
After plane crash: Calls for investigations are getting louder - Russia wants to thwart them
Russia has repeatedly tried to thwart international investigations, including into the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny with a chemical weapon in 2020 and the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine in 2014, for which two former Russian security officials were convicted of murder in a Dutch court.
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Zelensky suggested in his speech on Wednesday evening that the Ukrainian Air Force shot down the plane that crashed within striking distance of Ukraine.
Russia regularly carries out deadly attacks on Ukraine from the Belgorod region, including on Tuesday when 18 Ukrainians were killed across the country.
Wreckage of the Russian military transport aircraft Il-76 © EyePress/Imago
The incident – and the conflicting accounts – raise a number of troubling questions for the military and political leadership in Ukraine and Russia.
Regardless of whether there were Ukrainian prisoners of war on board the aircraft, the incident appears to mark a serious intelligence failure by Ukraine, which could not or would not immediately confirm who or what it believed was on board the aircraft.
The head of the Ukrainian Air Force accused Russia on Thursday of deliberately spreading false information “in order to discredit Ukraine.”
“Their clear goal is to diminish international support for our country,” Lt. Gen. Mykola Oleshchuk wrote on Telegram.
“That won’t work!
“Ukraine has the right to defend itself and destroy the aggressor’s airstrikes.”
Russian plane crashes – who was on board?
Ukraine is puzzling
Russian officials pointed the finger at Kiev but did not explain why a military plane was in such a vulnerable position that it was shot out of the sky - a serious violation of Russian air defenses that may indicate a breach of protocol.
Ukraine's State Security Service (SBU) announced on Thursday that it had opened an investigation.
Dmytro Lubinets, the Ukrainian parliament's human rights commissioner, said on Ukrainian television that he could not confirm whether there were prisoners of war on board the plane, but he assured that if there were videos or other evidence of such victims, Russia would have already used them.
“We did not see any signs that there were so many people - Ukrainian citizens or non-Ukrainians - on the plane,” he said.
Lubinets also called on international experts to investigate.
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Plane crash over Belgorod: Ukraine apparently received no information about
Ukrainian military intelligence confirmed that a prisoner exchange planned for Wednesday did not take place.
Ukraine was not informed in advance by Russia about plans to transport prisoners and was not warned to secure the airspace over Belgorod.
“Belgorod was not a point that should be included in the exchange process and there was no corresponding information from the Russian side,” said Andriy Yusov, a spokesman for Ukrainian military intelligence.
“The conversation was about the Sumy Oblast.” Sumy is the Ukrainian border region where the exchange was supposed to take place at a border checkpoint.
Investigations after plane crash: prisoner exchange should take place
Andriy Yusov said the Il-76 transport plane was “a military aircraft that should not have been used to transport prisoners of war.”
In contrast, Ukrainian officials have used civilian ground transportation to transport Russian prisoners of war to the exchange point.
(Regular air traffic in Ukraine has been suspended since Russia invaded in February 2022).
The Russian Defense Ministry said Ukraine was aware of the plans.
According to Russian information, in addition to the 65 prisoners of war, there were six crew members and three other people on board the aircraft who were killed.
Such exchanges are usually planned down to the smallest detail so that prisoners can pass each other on the way back to the care of their home country's troops.
Both militaries must coordinate to ensure the security of the area during the exchange and avoid accidental attacks at the exchange site.
Ukrainian prisoners of war report prisoner exchange: “Another kind of torture”
At the last prisoner exchange this month - the largest since the start of the war, in which the Russians handed over more than 200 Ukrainian prisoners of war - Moscow officials verbally informed their Kiev counterparts that the Ukrainian prisoners would be transported by air, Yusov said.
“This time there was no such information or request from the Russian side,” he said.
Oleksii, 44, a Ukrainian soldier who became a prisoner of war in the besieged port city of Mariupol in 2022, said planes were used to transport him and other soldiers as they were exchanged and returned home.
All Ukrainians on board the plane were blindfolded, he said.
"If you had a hat, it was pulled down to cover your eyes and secured with tape to make sure you couldn't see absolutely anything," he said.
Those who didn't have a hat used a bag, Oleksii said.
Oleksii's journey began in the Russian-occupied town of Olenivka in eastern Ukraine.
He then boarded a flight to Moscow from the southwestern Russian city of Taganrog and then flew to Gomel in southeastern Belarus before crossing the border into Ukraine.
He did not know the model of plane used, but said there were about 200 blindfolded Ukrainian prisoners on board.
Because of the blindfold, he wasn't sure how many Russian officials accompanied the group, but remembered six or seven distinct voices of Russians on board the plane.
In total, the trip took 36 hours, he said, and during that time he was unable to use a toilet, "which was another form of torture."
Ukrainian prisoners of war on board the crashed plane - the list is apparently available
Margarita Simonyan, the head of Russia's state-run propaganda channel RT, released a list of names and dates of birth on Thursday that she said documented the Ukrainian prisoners of war on board.
News channels quickly reported that some of the people Simonyan named appeared to be prisoners released in previous swaps.
Beyond that, however, Russia has so far provided little evidence to support the claim that dozens of prisoners of war were on board the plane.
State broadcaster RT broadcast a 20-second clip from the crash site showing debris but no body parts.
Another short clip published by RT purports to show a corpse, but the video is heavily blurred, making it impossible to determine what is actually depicted.
Russian officials and military bloggers have also glossed over the fact that if Ukraine actually hit a target as important as the Il-76 aircraft, it would represent a serious security breach for the military and the Belgorod region, which is a key theater of attacks on Ukraine and is a hub for supplying the Russian armed forces.
Details about plane crash: experts speak of a “tactical trick”
Some military experts suggested that the plane may have been on a route leading out of Belgorod.
Russian officials said the Il-76 was on a "scheduled flight" from Chkalovsky air base in the Moscow region to Belgorod.
However, according to an analysis by security service Janes, the plane's flight path and the crash site are "well beyond any holding pattern or maneuver" to approach the runway of the local airfield.
“Therefore, it can be assumed that the aircraft was not on a landing approach vector to Belgorod (unless it was instructed to stop at a point in that direction and distance from the airfield for tactical reasons),” Janes said.
Janes added that the plane was flying at low altitude, which "may have been a tactical ploy to stay below the radar horizon of Ukrainian defenses to the south, either approaching Belgorod or en route away from Belgorod."
All six crew members killed in the crash belonged to the Russian 117 Transport Aircraft Regiment based in Orenburg and were identified by regional authorities.
Zelensky said in his video address on Wednesday evening that he had gathered high-ranking military officials and talked to them about the “use of the air force.”
Ukraine's military intelligence service is busy finding out the fate of all prisoners.
Natalia Abbakumova in Riga, Latvia;
Serhiy Morgunov in Lisbon;
and Kostiantyn Khudov, Anastacia Galouchka and David L. Stern in Kiev contributed to this report.
About the author
Mary Ilyushina
, a foreign affairs reporter at The Washington Post, covers Russia and the region.
She began her career in independent Russian media before joining CNN's Moscow bureau in 2017 as a field producer.
She has been working for The Post since 2021.
She speaks Russian, English, Ukrainian and Arabic.
We are currently testing machine translations. This article was automatically translated from English into German.
This article was first published in English on January 26, 2024 at the “Washingtonpost.com” - as part of a cooperation, it is now also available in translation to readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals.