A large Russian military transport plane has crashed in the border region of Belgorod, according to Russia’s defence ministry, killing all 74 people on board.
The ministry said the Ilyushin Il-76 aircraft was carrying 65 Ukrainian PoWs who were to be swapped. The Guardian could not immediately verify Russian claims of who was onboard and the cause of the crash was not yet known.
The ministry added that onboard the Ilyushin Il-76 were also six crew and three Russian servicemen.
Ukraine has not directly commented on the incident. Mykhailo Podolyak, a Ukrainian presidential adviser, told Reuters: “Comments will come a little later. Time is needed to clarify all the data.”
The Ukrainskaya Pravda newspaper, initially cited sources which said Kyiv’s armed forces had shot down the plane but later withdrew the report.
Footage circulating on social media appeared to show the moment a large aircraft crashed and exploded in a vast fireball. Other images showed wreckage scattered over a snowy field.
The Soviet-designed Ilyushin Il-76 is a military transport aircraft designed to airlift troops, cargo, military equipment and weapons.
Russian officials and the country’s defence ministry accused Ukraine of deliberately shooting down the transport plane.
Ukraine’s military later released a statement in which it accused the Russian army of using military transport aircraft to deliver missiles to the Belgorod region to perform cross-border attacks in recent weeks.
“With this in mind, the Ukrainian armed forces will continue to take measures to destroy delivery vehicles and control airspace to eliminate the terrorist threat, including in the Belgorod-Kharkiv direction,” the statement said.
It did not confirm or deny the downing of the plane on Wednesday. But it followed the retracted Ukrainskaya Pravda report, which claimed the military had been targeting a shipment of S-300 missiles en route to Belgorod.
Vyacheslav Volodin, the chair of the Duma, said the plane had been “shot down” by Kyiv and blamed western missiles.
“They shot their own soldiers in the air. Their own,” Volodin told lawmakers in a plenary session. “Our pilots, who were carrying out a humanitarian mission, were shot down.”
Andrei Kartapolov, a senior lawmaker in Russia’s parliament and a retired general, said during a parliamentary session that the plane had been shot down by three missiles.
He did not reveal the source of his information. Kartapalov added that investigations would show whether the missiles were western-supplied Patriots or Iris-Ts.
Kartapalov claimed Russia and Ukraine were to exchange 192 prisoners each on Wednesday before the plane crash.
The Ukrainian state body responsible for prisoner exchanges did not confirm the incident, but urged caution over “enemy propaganda resources about the crash”.
A spokesperson for Ukraine’s military intelligence told Radio Liberty that a prisoner exchange between Russia and Ukraine was being prepared for Wednesday.
Andriy Yusov was quoted as saying: “I can state that the exchange planned for today is not taking place yet.”
Yusov added that his agency was checking the information provided by Russia that Ukrainian prisoners were onboard the crashed plane.
This month, the two countries announced the largest exchange of prisoners since the start of the war, involving the return of more than 200 soldiers from each side in a deal mediated by the United Arab Emirates.
Ukrainian commentators have questioned Russian claims that the plane was carrying 65 Ukrainian prisoners of war. No footage of the victims has been released, nor has the plane’s flight path been confirmed. Footage from the crash site published by RT, the Kremlin-backed news channel, blurred out the tail number of the plane, making it more difficult to confirm if the aircraft was involved in a prisoner exchange.
The Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine, is a vital stop on Russian supply lines. It has come under extensive shelling and drone attacks for months including a missile strike on the region’s capital in December that killed 25 people.
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