High-ranking Russian officials were supposed to be on board the Il-76 aircraft that crashed in Belogorod Oblast on Jan. 24, but the Federal Security Service (FSB) did not allow them to board at “the last moment,” Andrii Yusov, Ukraine’s military intelligence spokesperson, told RFE/RL on Jan. 25.
The Il-76 transport plane crashed in Russia’s Belgorod Oblast on Jan. 24, allegedly killing everyone on board. Russia’s Defense Ministry then claimed that 65 Ukrainian POWs had been on the plane due to a scheduled prisoner exchange later that day.
Ukraine’s military intelligence agency did not confirm whether prisoners were on the plane, nor commented on what might have caused the crash, but said a prisoner exchange had been planned for that day.
According to Yusov, Ukrainian intelligence suggests that several senior military and political officials should have been on board but were instead told by the FSB to use other modes of transport.
Espionage and counter-espionage are some intense, high stakes and callous games. War really is terrible.
I wonder if they were trying to out some mole or something.
My initial reaction was that this was some kind of counter-espionage action.
Here’s a good explainer about what’s known about the crash so far.
Adding further to the murk: a list of Ukrainian soldiers’ names, purporting to be the names of the POWs on the Il-76, was published not long after news of the crash by Margarita Simonyan, the longtime head of the state-controlled TV channel formerly known as Russia Today.
Several of the names on the list, however, matched those of Ukrainian soldiers who had been released in earlier prisoner exchanges.
Also mysterious: videos from the debris-strewn field showed few signs of bodies or human remains.
“Believe me, if there were seven or eight dozen people there, the field would be strewn with corpses and remains of bodies,” Roman Svitan, a Ukrainian aviation expert, told Current Time.
And:
“I’m not an expert, but if there were even photos and videos of our prisoners of war, (Russia) would have already posted it,” Lubinets said, referring to the photographic evidence of the crash site.
Russia (and tankies) would be posting it everywhere.
So… Russia sacrificed a $40M aircraft and crew to cause confusion and damage morale in Ukraine? And an opportunity to take this to the UN Security Council to call this “terrorism”?
Alternatively, may be that they had intel that the plane was going to be targeted, but weren’t certain about the reliability of their source. Thus they pulled out the high-ranking passengers in case, but let the plane go ahead as planned.
Mole hunt.
So it was an inside job that they tried to blame Ukraine for, just as I suspected
Can someone explain to me why this shootdown is even news instead of a statistic?
It’s a military airplane shot down in a shooting war. Does Russia now call the UN security council when Ukraine destroys a transport truck? Why is the media constantly falling for Russia’s bullshit behaviour?
It’s only really news because Russia is claiming that there were Ukrainian POWs on board en route to a prisoner exchange.
Russia does claim all kinds of shit is terrorism though. It was a military aircraft shot down in a war. They also waste the UN Security Council’s time over dumb bullshit constantly.
I dunno, I’m seeing this somewhat differently. Their ‘claim’ was that Ukraine shot down their own people.
This intelligence that they were going to have important targets who were originally going to board the plane hang back at the last moment gives a VERY different story, and that’s why this is news.
What it says is that they decided to kill the POWs themselves and make it ‘look’ like Ukraine did it, so they stopped regular travel for their own people.
