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Moscow has accused Kyiv of shooting down a military transport plane carrying Ukrainian prisoners of war, which crashed near Russia’s border with Ukraine on Wednesday morning.
The Russian defence ministry said all 74 people onboard the Il-76 plane died, including 65 Ukrainian soldiers who were being transported for a prisoner exchange from Moscow to the Belgorod region of Russia — the Russian border province that has faced the most spillover from President Vladimir Putin’s nearly two-year invasion.
Six crew members and three Russian service personnel accompanying the prisoners were also among the passengers, according to the defence ministry.
Video posted on the social media app Telegram showed a plane banking sharply near a village before bursting into a large ball of flame as it hit the ground. Trails from what appeared to be anti-aircraft fire were visible in the sky behind it, while the plane appeared to be on fire before it crashed.
Moscow claimed Kyiv’s forces shot down the plane in order to sabotage the PoW exchange “with the goal of accusing Russia of eliminating Ukrainian soldiers”.
Ukraine’s GUR military intelligence unit said Russia bore responsibility for the safe transport of Ukrainian POWs and that Kyiv should have been notified if they were on board the plane.
“We do not have reliable and comprehensive information about who exactly was on board the plane,” GUR said, adding that “the Ukrainian side was not informed about the need to ensure the safety of airspace in the area of Belgorod, as was repeatedly done in the past.”
Russia’s failure to do so, GUR added, suggests that the incident amounted to “planned and deliberate actions with the aim of destabilising the situation in Ukraine.”
In a cryptic statement issued after the crash, Ukraine’s general staff said it would continue to target Russian military transport planes in the Belgorod region given that they deliver missiles used to target the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.
“The armed forces of Ukraine will continue to take measures to destroy means of delivery, control the airspace to destroy the terrorist threat, including in the Belgorod-Kharkiv direction,” the statement said.
Ukrainian officials told the Financial Times they were investigating the downing and would provide more information later.
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Andriy Yusov, a GUR officer, told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Ukrainian service in Kyiv that a prisoner exchange had been scheduled for Wednesday but was suspended following the plane crash. When contacted by the FT, Yusov did not confirm that Kyiv had shot down the plane with its air defences and declined to comment until his office could verify the details of the incident.
Almost all prisoner swaps between the warring sides are carried out at a small border crossing connecting the Russian village of Kolotilovka, in Belgorod region, and the village of Pokrovka, in Ukraine’s Sumy region. The plane crashed about 150km east of the border crossing.
Ukraine and Russia conducted the largest swap of prisoners on January 3, when 230 Ukrainians were released in exchange for 248 Russians, according to each country’s defence officials. It was the first exchange of prisoners since August, due to what Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described as “Russia-related” reasons. In December, he said negotiations with Moscow over the exchanges were “complicated”.
Margarita Simonyan, editor of Russian foreign propaganda network RT, published what she said was a list of the 65 Ukrainian prisoners of war who had been on board the plane.
The Ukrainian state body responsible for prisoners of war urged caution over “enemy propaganda resources about the crash”.
Ukrainian media initially reported, citing anonymous sources, that Kyiv’s armed forces had shot the plane down and claimed it was carrying missiles used for air strikes against Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, which borders Belgorod. Some of them later deleted posts with those claims.
Anatoly Kartapolov, chair of the defence committee in Russia’s lower house of parliament, said another Il-76 carrying 80 Ukrainian prisoners of war had been following closely behind, but was safely diverted from the area.
Vyacheslav Gladkov, governor of the Belgorod region, said investigators and emergency workers were at the scene near the village of Yablonovo.
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