A Russian military transport plane crashed in the border region of Belgorod on Wednesday, killing dozens of people on board, according to multiple reports.
Footage purportedly shot by a bystander showed the IL-76 apparently already on fire as it plunged towards the ground, sending a huge fireball up into the sky as it struck. Russia’s Defense Ministry confirmed the crash, claiming 65 Ukrainian prisoners of war had been on board and on their way to a prisoner exchange. Moscow said six crew members had also been on the plane, along with three people accompanying them for the flight, according to Russia’s RIA Novosti.
Belgorod Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said the plane had come down “in a field near a populated area.”
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“Everyone on board died,” he wrote on Telegram.
Anonymous sources within the Ukrainian military, however, were quoted by Ukrainska Pravda as saying the plane had been transporting missiles used by Russian forces to target the Kharkiv region.
Shortly before the first reports began to surface about the plane crash, authorities in the Belgorod region had warned of a missile threat, though the warning was canceled about a half hour later.
Several Ukrainian media outlets had initially reported that the plane was downed by Ukraine’s military, though those claims were quickly redacted. Authorities in Kyiv said they were still working to gather information on the circumstances of the crash.
Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War issued a statement saying authorities were “gathering and analyzing all necessary information” about the crash. The agency neither confirmed nor denied that Ukrainian prisoners had been on board the doomed plane but stressed that Russia is known to distort the facts in order to destabilize Ukrainian society.
