On the night of October 17, the Ischenko family is said to have sat down to dinner in their apartment on the seventh floor of a block of flats in the southern Russian port city of Yeisk.
But as the family gathered, a Russian Su-34 supersonic plane crashed through their apartment window, sending a huge cloud of fire into the sky. All seven members of the Ischenko family, including three children, were killed.
“After a few phone calls, I thought, let at least one child live,” said Andrei Ischenko, who lost his brother, sister-in-law and their children and grandchildren in the crash. “I was ready to adopt the children if the parents died. But it turned out that way,” he added in an interview with media outlet 7×7
The Yeysk tragedy was just the first of two recent incidents in which Russian warplanes have crashed into civilian areas. Days later on Sunday, a Su-30 jet crashed into a two-story house in Siberia, killing both pilots on board.
The crashes have spread fear and panic in Russia, with some Russians expressing feelings that their country’s invasion of Ukraine is drawing ever closer to home.
“When the incident happened, everyone thought the war had come to our home until we later found out it was a plane crash,” Alan Kachmazov, a resident of Yeysk, told The Moscow Times.
Separated from southern Ukraine by a narrow stretch of the Sea of Azov, Yeysk is home to an air base that served as a launch pad for the Russian Air Force during the invasion of Ukraine.
“Even earlier [the crash]locals worried about planes flying over the city every day,” Kachmasov said.
But the apartment block crash, which killed a total of 15 people and injured 43 others, has prompted some residents to call for answers about the deadliest military incident on Russian soil since the invasion began.
“Well, the grief is over, the guilty are not guilty,” Igor Korenev wrote in a social media post about the Yeysk disaster.
“The planes again circled over residential areas as if the fields and sea were not enough for training purposes. Mistakes teach nothing to those who are not really responsible for them!” Korenev, who hails from the Rostov region in southern Russia, added.
The Department of Defense said the plane crashed due to a malfunction in one of the engines’ ignition systems during takeoff.
The Board of Inquiry, Russia’s equivalent of the FBI, has launched a criminal probe into possible flight rule violations.
Photos of the aftermath of the incident, which drove hundreds of civilians from their homes, showed collapsed walls and mounds of burned rubble.
Just days later, another military jet crashed into the ground in the Siberian city of Irkutsk. While no civilians were injured, the crash killed both pilots, who were reportedly passed out as the plane dove.
Later footage showed a house on fire in central Irkutsk, a city of 600,000, sparking complaints that Russian officials had again failed to protect citizens from the country’s own military jets.
“An uncontrolled plane flew over the city, why was there no warning for residents?” Artyom Valhala from Irkutsk said in a comment on the VKontakte social network.
Eight months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the clashes, coupled with Moscow’s latest “partial mobilization push,” are reminding many Russians of the war raging on their borders, despite their efforts to get on with their lives.
But in Yeysk, just 60 kilometers across the sea from Russian-held Mariupol, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the war as jets fly overhead and residents mourn.
“Everyone across the city realized they could easily have been,” Kachmazov said.