Moscow and Kyiv gave conflicting accounts of how the Ilyushin Il-76 was downed Wednesday in Russia\u2019s Belgorod region, which neighbors eastern Ukraine. Moscow says the plane was transporting Ukrainian prisoners of war, while Kyiv says it was carrying Russian missiles to be used in further strikes on Ukraine. <\/p>\n
But the latest comments indicate Kyiv\u2019s growing confidence that the IL-76 plane, which crashed Wednesday morning in the village of Yablonovo in Russia\u2019s Belgorod region, may not have been carrying Ukrainian prisoners of war ahead of an exchange, as Moscow claimed. <\/p>\n
Moscow claimed all 74 people on board \u2013 comprising six crew members, three military escorts and 65 Ukrainian servicemen \u2013 were killed in the crash. A Russian regional governor posted a list of names of the people he said made up the six-person crew. <\/p>\n
Russia <\/strong>initially <\/strong>failed to produce visual evidence to back up its claims there were Ukrainian soldiers on the plane. <\/strong>The first video that emerged from the crash site, of which some was broadcast on Russia state media, appeared to show several dead bodies on the ground, but no images appeared to suggest there were dozens of fatalities. <\/p>\n The\u00a0Russian Investigative Committee released a second video on Thursday, which they claim is from the crash site, and appears to show human remains in the snow. <\/p>\n The video shows investigators measuring what appears to be a bloody human hand and a dismembered arm. In separate clips, the video also shows aerial footage of the crash site and remnants of the plane. It is unclear if the human remains in the video are in the same location as the\u00a0remnants of the plane. <\/p>\n The SAR image shows a sprawl of debris littering the crash site of the Il-76.\u00a0The debris field is just under a mile long, and stretches about 800 feet at its widest point. <\/p>\n Moscow also accused Kyiv of downing the plane with an anti-aircraft missile system from Ukrainian territory, claiming the radar equipment of the Russian Aerospace Forces detected two Ukrainian missiles. Ukraine\u2019s military command said it regarded Russian military aircraft approaching Belgorod as legitimate target, but did not confirm it had fired at the plane. <\/p>\n Both Moscow and Kyiv agree that a prisoner exchange had been planned for Wednesday, with the swap due to take place some 60 kilometers west of Belgorod city. Ukraine\u2019s ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets said Thursday in a televised interview that the swap was planned and the \u201crepresentatives of our institution were present.\u201d <\/p>\n But Yusov said Ukraine had not received notification that the prisoners would be flown into the region, rather than being transferred by road or rail. In the only other recent prisoner of war exchange, which happened earlier this month, Russia had sent a deconfliction alert to Ukraine to keep Belgorod\u2019s airspace free, Yusov said, which Ukraine had observed. <\/p>\n Yusov also claimed that Russian IL-76 aircraft were often used to carry S-300 missiles to forward positions, and that Russia was restocking its missiles in Belgorod region after several waves of attacks on the nearby Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. <\/p>\n Yusov\u2019s comments, which cast doubt on the account given by Moscow, echo similar remarks made overnight into Thursday by Mykola Oleschuk, commander of the Ukrainian air force. \u201cFrantic Russian propaganda is directing a stream of fake information to an external audience in an attempt to discredit Ukraine in the eyes of the world community,\u201d he said in a statement. <\/p>\n Lubinets also called Moscow\u2019s unsubstantiated account \u201ca vivid example of Russia planning an information campaign against Ukraine in advance.\u201d He said he has sent official letters to the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) asking whether they were informed by Russia about a transfer of prisoners of war by plane. <\/p>\n Ukraine\u2019s Security Service (SBU) on Thursday launched a criminal investigation into the crash. The government communications body also urged for an international investigation into the incident, saying \u201cthere is no evidence that any Ukrainian citizens were killed on board\u201d and that \u201cRussian official statements cannot be trusted.\u201d <\/p>\n Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Thursday it is too soon to talk about instructions from Russian President Vladimir Putin regarding the military plane crash as an investigation is still underway. <\/p>\n He called the downing of the IL-76 an \u201cabsolutely monstrous act\u201d since the plane was allegedly carrying Ukrainian servicemen \u201cwho should have been at home literally in a day.\u201d <\/p>\n\n Moscow and Kyiv gave conflicting accounts of how the Ilyushin Il-76 was downed Wednesday in Russia\u2019s Belgorod region, which neighbors eastern Ukraine. Moscow says the plane was transporting Ukrainian prisoners of war, while Kyiv says it was carrying Russian missiles to be used in further strikes on Ukraine. But the latest comments indicate Kyiv\u2019s growing <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":14607,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-14604","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14604","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14604"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14604\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14607"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} More claims from Moscow<\/h2>\n