But in their statements about the incident, senior Ukrainian officials, including President Volodymyr Zelensky, have not denied downing the plane, and some have emphasized Ukraine’s right — and urgent need — to target Russian military aircraft given Moscow’s ongoing invasion, constant airstrikes on Ukrainian cities and push to seize more territory.
Zelensky said Wednesday evening that he would insist on an international investigation. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov replied with acid snark — accusing Kyiv of killing its own soldiers. He called the downing of the plane “a monstrous act … beyond comprehension,” and said Moscow would welcome an international inquiry.
“If he means an international investigation into the criminal acts of the Kyiv regime, then it is definitely needed,” Peskov told journalists.
Russia has repeatedly sought to thwart international investigations, including into the 2020 poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny with a chemical weapon and the 2014 downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine, for which two former Russian security service officers were convicted of murder in a Dutch court.
Zelensky in his speech Wednesday evening implied that Ukraine’s air force had shot down the plane, which crashed within striking range of Ukraine. Russia regularly launches deadly strikes from the Belgorod region into Ukraine, including Tuesday, when 18 Ukrainians were killed across the country.
The incident — and the conflicting narratives — raise an array of troubling questions for military and political leaders in Ukraine and Russia.
Regardless of whether Ukrainian POWs were on the plane, the incident appears to mark a grave intelligence failure on the part of Ukraine — which was not immediately able, or willing, to confirm who or what they believed was on board the aircraft.
The chief of Ukraine’s air force accused Russia on Thursday of intentionally spreading fake information “to discredit Ukraine.”
“Their clear goal is to diminish international support for our country,” Lt. Gen. Mykola Oleshchuk wrote on Telegram. “It won’t succeed! Ukraine has the right to defend itself and destroy the aggressor’s means of aerial attack.”
Russian officials, while pointing fingers at Kyiv, have not explained why a military airplane was in such a vulnerable position that it was shot from the sky — a grave breach of Russia’s air defenses, and one possibly indicating a break in protocol.
Ukraine’s State Security Service, the SBU, announced Thursday that it had opened an investigation. Dmytro Lubinets, the Ukrainian parliamentary commissioner for human rights, said on Ukrainian television that he could not confirm whether prisoners of war were on the flight, but he asserted that if there were videos or other evidence confirming such casualties, Russia “would have already used them.”
“We did not see any signs that there were so many people on the plane — citizens of Ukraine or noncitizens of Ukraine,” he said. Lubinets also called for international experts to investigate.
Ukraine’s military intelligence directorate did confirm that an exchange of prisoners that was set to take place Wednesday did not occur. It also asserted that Ukraine was not informed in advance by Russia of any transport plans for prisoners and had not been warned to safeguard the airspace over Belgorod.
“Belgorod wasn’t a point that was considered to be involved in the exchange process, and there was no such information from the Russian side,” said Andriy Yusov, a spokesman for Ukraine’s military intelligence. “The conversation was about Sumy oblast.” Sumy is the Ukrainian border region where the exchange was to occur at a border checkpoint.
Yusov said that the Il-76 transport plane was “a military plane that shouldn’t have been used for the transportation of POWs.” By contrast, Ukrainian officials have used civilian ground transportation to bring Russian POWs to the exchange point. (Regular air travel in Ukraine has been suspended since Russia’s February 2022 invasion.)
The Russian Defense Ministry said Ukraine was aware of the plans. In addition to the 65 POWs, Russia said, six crew members and three other individuals were on board the plane and were killed.
Such exchanges are typically planned in extreme detail down to the last minute of the swap, when prisoners may pass each other as they each cross back into the custody of troops from their home country. Both militaries must coordinate to ensure the safety of the area during the process and avoid accidental strikes on the point of exchange.
Earlier this month, during the most recent prisoner exchange — the largest since the beginning of the war, in which Russians handed over more than 200 Ukrainian POWs — Moscow officials informed their Kyiv counterparts verbally that the Ukrainian prisoners would be transported by air, Yusov said.
“This time, this kind of information or request didn’t take place by the Russian side,” he said.
Oleksii, 44, a Ukrainian soldier who was taken prisoner of war in the besieged port city of Mariupol in 2022, said that planes were used to transport him and other soldiers when they were exchanged and returned home. All Ukrainians on board the flight were blindfolded, he said. “If you had a hat, they would put it down to cover your eyes and fix it with a tape to make sure you could see absolutely nothing,” he said. “For those who did not have a hat, they used a bag.”
Oleksii’s journey began in the Russian-occupied city of Olenivka in eastern Ukraine. He then boarded a flight in the southwestern Russian city of Taganrog to Moscow, then flew to Gomel in southeastern Belarus before crossing into Ukraine at the border. He did not know the model of aircraft that was used but said roughly 200 blindfolded Ukrainian prisoners were on board. Because of the blindfold, he was not sure how many Russian officials chaperoned the group but remembers six or seven distinct voices of Russians on board the plane.
In all, the journey took 36 hours, he said, during which he was not able to use a bathroom, “which was another kind of torture.”
Adding to the swirl of recriminations on Thursday, Margarita Simonyan, the head of the Russian state propaganda channel RT, published a list of names and birth dates that she said documented the Ukrainian POWs on board. News outlets quickly reported that some of those named by Simonyan appeared to be prisoners released in previous swaps.
Beyond this, however, Russia so far has provided little evidence to support the claim that dozens of prisoners of war were on the plane. The state-run RT channel shared a 20-second clip from the crash site, showing scattered debris but no visible body parts. Another short clip released by RT purported to show one dead body, although the video is heavily blurred, making it impossible to determine what is actually pictured.
Russian officials and military bloggers have also glossed over the fact that if Ukraine indeed hit such a major target as the Il-76 plane, this would constitute a serious security lapse for the military and for Belgorod region, which is a key staging ground for attacks on Ukraine and a hub for resupplying Russian forces.
Some military experts pointed out that the plane was possibly on a path routing out of Belgorod. Russian officials said the Il-76 was on “a planned flight” to Belgorod from Chkalovsky air base in the Moscow region.
But according to analysis by Janes, the security intelligence firm, the plane’s flight path, as well as the crash site, “is well beyond any holding pattern or maneuver” to approach the runway of the local airfield.
“Therefore it can safely be assumed that the aircraft was not on an approach vector to land at Belgorod (unless it was directed to hold at a point at such a bearing and distance from the airfield, for tactical reasons),” Janes said.
Janes added that the aircraft was flying at a low altitude, which could have been “a tactical ploy to remain below the radar horizon of the Ukrainian defenses to the south, either in approach to Belgorod, or in a route out from Belgorod.”
All six crew members killed in the crash were assigned to Russia’s 117th military transport aviation regiment stationed in Orenburg and have been identified by regional authorities.
Zelensky in his somber video address Wednesday evening said he had gathered top military officials and spoken to them about their “use of the air force.” Ukraine’s military intelligence directorate, he said, “is engaged in finding out the fate of all prisoners.”
Zelensky’s delay in commenting publicly on the crash until late Wednesday spurred some criticism in Ukraine. Lawmaker Oleksiy Honcharenko, posting on Telegram, said that officials stayed quiet because of “ratings and negativity. And they want to be involved only in the positive.”
Natalia Abbakumova in Riga, Latvia; Serhiy Morgunov in Lisbon; and Kostiantyn Khudov, Anastacia Galouchka and David L. Stern in Kyiv contributed to this report.
