Ukrainian prisoners of war were not on board the Russian Il-76 transport plane that crashed near the border with Ukraine last month, a senior Ukrainian national security official said Friday.
The Kremlin on Friday denied claims by Kyiv that it had ignored requests to return the remains of Ukrainian prisoners of war who allegedly died in a military plane crash last week. “The administration did not [receive Kyiv’s request],” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the state-run news agency RIA Novosti.
Russian investigators concluded Friday that two missiles launched from a U.S.-made surface-to-air system shot down a military transport plane near the Russian-Ukrainian border last week. Russia's Investigative Committee, which probes major crimes, said over 100 fragments of MIM-104A anti-aircraft missiles, as well as hundreds of body parts, were recovered from the crash site in the western Belgorod region. “It has been established that on Jan. 24, 2024, [Ukrainian] servicemen from the Liptsy settlement in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region attacked an Il-76 military transport aircraft of the Russian Aerospace Forces with two missiles using an anti-aircraft system,” the law enforcement body said.
Information recovered from the “black boxes” of the Russian Il-76 military transport plane that crashed near the border with Ukraine last week indicates the aircraft was shot down, the state-run news agency TASS reported Tuesday, citing an anonymous security agency source. “The data from the black boxes exclude all [other] possible versions of the Il-76 crash and confirm that the plane was subjected to external impact,” the source was quoted as saying. “In other words, it was shot down in the air.