Crash of Il-76, death of prisoners of war
The Russian Ministry of Defense published details about the crash of an Il-76 military transport aircraft in the Belgorod region on January 24. There were Ukrainian prisoners of war on board the plane; the Russian military department called the incident a terrorist attack.
“The aircraft was destroyed by the armed forces of Ukraine from the area of Liptsy, Kharkov region, using an anti-aircraft missile system. The Russian Aerospace Forces radar equipment observed the launch of two Ukrainian missiles,” the release said.
The Ministry of Defense confirms the death of 65 Ukrainian prisoners of war, three Russian servicemen accompanying them and the aircraft crew.
The Ukrainian command knew that there were prisoners on the plane: this was agreed upon, and the board had already carried out such flights before.
Russia Today editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan published lists of dead prisoners: information about some of them can be found in open sources. Among the dead military personnel: border guards who were captured at the beginning of the conflict on Zmeiny Island, paratroopers, soldiers of the Azov regiment *, mobilized. Many were captured at the beginning of the conflict.
Civilian casualties were avoided thanks to the skill of the pilots. In a commentary to RIA Novosti, a resident of the village of Yabloneva, Korochansky district, Belgorod region, in the sky above which the plane was shot down, the rector of the local church, Georgy Borovikov, said that the plane in the last seconds went away from the houses - into a field.
“The temple was not damaged in any way when the plane crashed. Nothing was damaged in the village; it fell outside the village, in the fields, about five or six kilometers away,” he told reporters. On air on the Vmeste-RF TV channel, Senator Viktor Bondarev explained that the crew of the Il-76 did not use heat traps to prevent a missile strike, since it was flying over Russian territory.
"He was flying over our territory. He was flying to his airfield from his airfield. The pilots acted as written in the instructions," he said.
As Andrei Kartapolov, chairman of the Russian State Duma Committee on Defense, said in the morning, the planned exchange of prisoners did not take place.
This fact was confirmed by the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense (GUR MO) of Ukraine:
“I can state that the exchange planned for today is not taking place yet,” said Andrei Yusov, a representative of the GUR, on Radio Liberty.
The Ukrainian side has not yet commented on the information about the death of prisoners of war. In particular, the adviser to the head of the Office of the President of Ukraine (OP), Mikhail Podolyak, answered a question from Reuters journalists that the information will be available later, but for now it is only being verified.
The commander of the Ukrainian troops in the Kharkov region, General Sergei Melnik, repeated one of the versions of the Ukrainian media on his social networks: according to him, the plane was transporting not prisoners, but S-300 missiles, calling on his audience not to believe “the tales of Putin’s terrorists.”
Already in the evening, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine published an official statement, which said:
“Taking this into account, the Armed Forces of Ukraine will continue to take measures to destroy delivery vehicles and control airspace to eliminate the terrorist threat, including in the Belgorod-Kharkov direction.”
The dead prisoners are not mentioned in the document.
A scandal broke out in the Ukrainian media on the topic of the Il-76 crash. While the official authorities are silent, and state media (Ukrainskaya Pravda, RBC-Ukraine, UNIAN and others) edit their original materials, in which they called the plane crash “the work of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.”
bbabo.Net