24-1-2024 (MOSCOW) A Russian military transport plane crashed near the southern city of Belgorod, close to the Ukraine border, as reported by Russian authorities on Wednesday.
According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, the plane was carrying 65 Ukrainian prisoners of war. NBC News has sought comment from Ukraine’s armed forces to independently verify the passenger list.
The incident’s cause and whether there were any survivors remain unclear at this time.
The Ilyushin Il-76, engaged in a scheduled flight, went down in the region adjacent to Ukraine’s northeastern border, according to a statement from the defense ministry published by the state-run Tass news agency.
The statement mentioned, “On board were 65 captured military personnel of the Ukrainian Armed Forces transported to the Belgorod region for exchange, as well as six crew members and three accompanying persons.”
A team has been dispatched to the crash site to investigate the incident, the statement added.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov stated that the Russian government is looking into the situation.
Andrey Kartapolov, the chair of the Russian parliament’s defense committee, asserted during a parliamentary speech that the plane was shot down by three air defense missiles supplied to Ukraine by its Western allies. He claimed that the Ukrainian leadership was well aware of the impending exchange and was informed about how the prisoners would be transported, without providing details on the source of this information.
Despite ongoing conflicts along the war’s front lines in Ukraine’s east and south, the two countries regularly conduct exchanges of prisoners.
In recent weeks, regions across western Russia, including Belgorod, have faced regular attacks, with Russian officials accusing Kyiv of carrying out the strikes. Ukrainian officials rarely publicly claim responsibility for attacks on Russian territory or the occupied Crimean Peninsula. However, larger aerial strikes against Russia have previously followed heavy assaults on Ukrainian cities.
Belgorod, the largest Russian city near the border, with a population of approximately 340,000 people, is situated about 60 miles north of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city. The situation surrounding the crash raises concerns about the ongoing tensions and conflict dynamics between Russia and Ukraine.
