Ukraine’s minister for internal affairs was among 15 killed early Wednesday when a helicopter crashed near a kindergarten in the Kyiv suburb of Brovary, officials said.
Three children were also killed, Kyiv regional governor Oleksiy Kuleba wrote on Telegram. It’s not yet clear what caused the helicopter to plunge from the sky.
In a statement, Ukraine’s Parliament confirmed that Denys Monastyrsky, the minister for internal affairs, was among the dead, along with Yevhen Yenin, the first deputy minister, and Yurii Lubkovich, the state secretary.
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“It should be noted that this is almost the first loss of employees of this level in Ukraine since the beginning of the full-scale invasion,” the statement added.
President Volodymyr Zelensky called the crash an “awful tragedy” in a statement on Telegram and said he’d tasked the country’s Security Service with getting to the bottom of the cause of the crash, along with the National Police.
“Unspeakable pain,” he wrote.
Authorities had initially put the death toll at 18, before revising it downwards to 15. The State Emergency Service said 25 people were also injured, 10 of them children.
Ihor Klymenko, the head of Ukraine’s National Police, said in a Facebook post that the helicopter belonged to the state emergency service. Earlier on Wednesday, Kuleba confirmed that the aircraft came down “near a kindergarten and a residential building.”
“At the time of the tragedy, children and employees of the institution were in the kindergarten,” Kuleba wrote on Telegram. “At this point, everyone was evacuated. There are victims. Ambulances, police and firefighters are working at the scene of the crash.”
Before the deadly incident, the helicopter was heading to a “hot spot” where “hostilities are taking place,” Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy head of the presidential office, told Ukraine’s Hromadske news station.
Nine of those killed were locals “bringing their children to the kindergarten,” Tymoshenko added, CNN reports.
Varvara Zhomud, 13, was at home right next to the crash scene packing her books to go to school when she and her mother Natalka Koounska, 42, heard the “horribly scary sound” early Wednesday.
“I am terrified to go to school again, there will be no more school classes, I guess,” Varvara told The Daily Beast. “Children died in the kindergarten, I could be one of them because the school is right [next] to the kindergarten,” she said sobbing. “ I want to go abroad.”
Natalka Koounska, left, with daughter Varvara Zhomud in Brovary
Anna Nemtsova“The sound continued for about two minutes,” Natalka added. “This catastrophe is the pivot of the war, it’s only now I start thinking of evacuating my children. This is too dangerous to stay when kids get killed in the kindergarten.”
Dramatic footage of the aftermath of the crash shared on social media showed fire and smoke consuming the crash site, with nearby buildings also in flames, as screams are heard in the distance.
“I heard the explosion, rushed to the window, and saw a huge hole in the ground, lots of fire all over, and a tiny 5-year-old child was burning,” Olga Kudriavets, who lives next to the kindergarten, told The Daily Beast.
She says it was 8:06 a.m. when she saw the scene of horror unfolding outside.
“I wish I could instantly rush out and cover the burning child with my body. Then I saw a man running towards that tiny boy, he undressed the kid and stopped the fire. It sounded like our entire district was howling and screaming.”
It was so foggy in the morning that people could not see neighboring buildings in the courtyard.
“There are nine and 16-story buildings around the kindergarten and school #10, I don’t understand how the military could fly in such fog over the thickly populated district in our town of Brovary,” Oleksandr, a 58-year-old veteran of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, told The Daily Beast at the scene.
“This is the first time since the beginning of the war when a top official gets killed,” political analyst Mykola Davydiuk told The Daily Beast. “The interior minister Denys Monastyrsky was very close to President Zelensky, as we say one of the first handshakes. The official version is that the helicopter crashed due to the strong wind, the weather, but we have doubts, this is very suspicious. It’s also unclear why the helicopter was flying so close to the ground.”
