War between Ukraine and RussiaFilesA plane crashed this Wednesday, January 24, in the Russian region of Belgorod, on the border with Ukraine. Moscow says it was targeted by missiles fired from a German-made Ukrainian anti-aircraft system.
Not surprisingly, Kiev and Moscow do not tell the same story at all. On Wednesday morning, a Russian Il-76 military aircraft crashed in the Belgorod region on the border with Ukraine. On board were “65 captured soldiers of the Ukrainian army who were transported to the Belgorod region with a view to an exchange, six crew members and three companions,” the Russian Defense Ministry hastened to explain, accusing the Ukrainian regime in Kiev of “having one “Committed a terrorist attack by shooting down a Russian military transport plane.”
According to Moscow, the Ukrainian army knew “perfectly well” that the Russians would take the Ukrainian prisoners by air to Belgorod and then to a meeting point at the border. The Ukrainians therefore decided to discredit the Russians by firing missiles from “an anti-aircraft system” from the Kharkiv region (northeast). According to the chairman of the defense committee in the Duma, Russia's parliament, the plane was shot down by three missiles from a German-made Patriot, or Iris-T, surface-to-air system. For their part, some Ukrainian media claimed that the Russian plane was carrying S-300 missiles and was actually shot down by the Ukrainian Defense Forces before retreating.
Without providing any evidence
In the images circulating on social networks, we see a plane almost plummeting and a mushroom cloud of fire and black smoke rising into the sky in a huge explosion. But nothing in these few seconds of footage suggests that the plane was shot down by missiles mid-flight, several observers emphasize. Not even to declare it invalid. But the rapidity with which the Russians accuse the Ukrainians of “terrorism” and the enormity of the accusations – “they killed their own soldiers in the air,” says Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin, assuring this without providing any evidence “American and German missiles” were used – immediately urges caution.
New elements quickly confused the Moscow version even more: the plane was not flying towards the Ukrainian border, but in the opposite direction, into the interior of Russia. According to Mark Voyger, former US Army special adviser for Russian affairs in Europe, “we can safely rule out that the plane was carrying prisoners of war” because the expensive model is typically used by Russian air defense.
Authenticity not confirmed
Then Russian propagandist and editor-in-chief of RT, the always terrible Margarita Simonyan, published a list of 65 Ukrainian prisoners of war who she claimed were aboard the Il-76. The authenticity of the list was not confirmed by anyone, but several media outlets pointed out that some of the names on it were already circulating in the public space. In addition, according to the Telegram channel “Mariupol Now”, at least 17 of the prisoners named in Simonyan’s list returned to Ukraine as part of an exchange on January 3rd.
At the end of the day, the General Staff of the Ukrainian Army issued a press release that did not directly mention the incident, but repeated the elements previously expressed in the Ukrainian media about the presence of S-aircraft grenades on board the downed aircraft. 300 surface-to-air missile systems. In the same text, the army also promised to continue “destroying delivery vehicles and controlling airspace to eliminate the terrorist threat, including in the Belgorod-Kharkiv area” to combat attacks. Russians in Ukraine. Ukrainian military intelligence also confirmed that a prisoner exchange was planned for January 24. By rejecting Russian allegations regarding the Il-76 passengers. “Currently, we do not have reliable and complete information about the people on board the aircraft and their number,” said the statement from the General Directorate of Intelligence of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine.