The trip home for 65 Ukrainian prisoners of war turned into a tragedy on Wednesday when the Russian military plane they were traveling in, an Iliushin Il-76, crashed near the border between the two Slavic countries. According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, they were to be exchanged for Russian soldiers captured by the Ukrainian Army.
It is too early to know the cause of what happened. But Russian deputy Andrei Kartapolov, a retired general who chairs the Duma Defense Commission, said in a session of the Lower House that the plane was shot down by three of the missiles that the West has supplied to Ukraine. According to him, the projectiles would have been Patriot (American-made) or IRIS-T (German-made).
According to the legislator, the crashed plane was followed by another Il-76 with about 80 prisoners on board. After what happened, he was made to return. Kartapólov assured, as quoted by Interfax, that this Wednesday, January 24, an exchange of prisoners of war “192 for 192” was going to take place.
The deputy accused Ukraine of wanting to sabotage the exchange. “It was completely deliberate. They knew very well that the plane was en route, where it was going and the (Ukrainian) operators of surface-to-air missile systems cannot confuse transport planes with planes or helicopters as targets,” Kartapolov said in SHOT channel television.
The two Slavic countries are fighting the most serious armed conflict in Europe since the Second World War. Next month it will be two years since Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his Armed Forces to enter the neighboring country on February 24, 2022.
The Russian transport plane crashed in the Belgorod oblast around 11:00 a.m. (9:00 a.m. in Barcelona), the Ministry of Defense said in a statement. The regional governor, Viacheslav Gladkov, previously specified that the event occurred in the Korocha region, when he announced that he was urgently traveling to that area because an “incident” had occurred, and that investigators and emergency services were already working there. . The plane fell near the town of Yablonovo, a town with about 1,700 inhabitants.
Because it borders Ukraine, Belgorod is the Russian region hardest hit in this conflict. At the end of last year, on December 30, it suffered the largest attack by Ukrainian artillery against Russian territory, in a bombardment that left 25 dead, according to Russia.
It was the Ukrainian response to a massive Russian air attack against several Ukrainian cities that the day before caused the death of 55 civilians, according to Ukraine.
The military note on the Il-76 indicates that six crew members and three Russian soldiers were also traveling on the plane, in charge of the prisoners. All of the ship’s occupants, 74 in total, lost their lives, Governor Gladkov confirmed.
A video posted on Telegram by the Baza channel shows a huge aircraft falling to the ground and exploding in a huge fireball.
Duma Speaker Viacheslav Volodin announced that the Lower House of the Russian Parliament will prepare a complaint to the US Congress and the German Bundestag, “so that deputies can finally see clearly who they are financing, who they are helping “.
According to the politician, close to President Putin, the Ukrainians “shot down our defenseless pilots of a military transport plane with American and German missiles when they were carrying out a humanitarian mission.” He further claimed that Ukraine had “shot down its own soldiers in the air. Their mothers, wives and children were waiting for them.”
Several Ukrainian media outlets, including Ukrainskaya Pravda, claimed that the Ukrainian Army had shot down an Il-76 carrying missiles for S-300 launchers, citing sources from the military high command. Ukrainskaya Pravda later removed this information from its website.
