Black box found for downed Rusian military plane

Russia has blamed Ukrainian forces for downing the IL-76 transport and opened a ‘terrorism’ probe into the crash.

An aviation investigator works at the Russian IL-76 military transport plane crash site in the Belgorod region. Picture: Russian Investigative Committee via AFP

Questions remained on Friday over a military plane crash that Russia said had killed dozens of captured Ukrainian soldiers ahead of a planned prisoner exchange, with Moscow and Kyiv trading accusations at the UN ­Security Council.

Russia has blamed Ukrainian forces for downing the IL-76 transport plane over the southern Belgorod region on Wednesday. It said 65 captured Ukrainian soldiers were on board, as well as their escorts and the crew.

Russia’s Investigative Committee, which probes major crimes, said it had opened a “terrorism” probe into the crash, saying the plane was downed by a “missile from the territory of Ukraine”. It released a 39-second video of the scene that mainly showed aerial shots of a large blackened stretch in a snow-­covered field with some damaged trees. The video also showed a block of twisted metal and wires.

“Fragmented remains of ­people were found, as well as the flight recorders of the aircraft, which were sent for decoding,” the Investigative Committee said.

Ukraine’s SBU security service said it had also opened a criminal probe into the downing, specifically into “violations of the laws and customs of war”.

Ukraine Rights Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets called for the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross to be allowed to inspect the crash site.

At an emergency session of the UN Security Council on Thursday night, requested by Russia to discuss the downed plane, Moscow and Kyiv both sought to pin the blame on the other.

“All of the information that we have today shows that we are dealing with a premeditated, thought-through crime,” said Russia’s deputy ambassador to the UN, Dmitry Polyanskiy, adding that Ukraine’s leaders “knew the route very well, knew about the way the soldiers were going to be transported to the place of exchange”. He accused Kyiv of sacrificing its own troops “to Western geopolitical interests”.

Ukraine deputy ambassador Khrystyna Hayovyshyn rejected the accusation, saying “Ukraine was not informed about the number of vehicles, roads and means of transportation of the captives”.

“This alone may constitute intentional actions by Russia to endanger the lives and safety of the prisoners,” she said.

While Ukraine has not denied outright that it downed the plane, officials in Kyiv have questioned key aspects of Russia’s narrative, such as whether Ukrainian servicemen were killed.

Ukraine’s military intelligence said it had no “comprehensive information” detailing who was on the flight. Kyiv has confirmed that an exchange had been scheduled for later on Wednesday on the border between the two countries but the military intelligence unit said Moscow had not informed it in advance that the POWs would be transported by plane, as it had in the past.

In August, the plane carrying the leader of the Wagner mercenary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, crashed on a flight from Moscow to Saint Petersburg. Prigozhin died alongside his top aides in the incident, two months after they attempted to topple Russia’s military leadership, angering President Vladimir Putin. Mr Putin said the plane had crashed because passengers had detonated a grenade on board, but Moscow provided no evidence.

In July 2014, when Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine with 298 people on board killed, including 38 Australians, the Kremlin proposed many explanations – sometimes contradictory.

AFP