Russia attributes the military plane crash in Crimea, which resulted in the deaths of all 29 people on board, to a “technical failure”
The Russian Defense Ministry says the crash of an An-26 in Crimea was caused by a “technical failure,” which killed all 29 people on board.
Russian officials say that a military transport plane crashed in the occupied Crimean peninsula, killing all 29 people on board.
Russia’s defense ministry said in a statement on Tuesday that the An-26 plane’s wreckage was found after it lost touch during what it called a “routine flight.” The ministry said that the problem was a “technical failure” and that there was no sign that the plane had been hit from the outside.
“The aircraft had a ‘technical failure,'” the ministry said, adding that there was no damage that could have been caused by “missiles, drones, or birds.”
Seven staff members and 23 passengers were on board when the plane crashed over Crimea, a peninsula in Ukraine that Russia took over in 2014.
It was confirmed by Russia’s Investigative Committee, which also said it was looking into whether any flight safety rules were broken.
The state news agency Tass said that contact with the plane was lost around 18:00 local time (15:00 GMT), which led to a search-and-rescue operation that eventually found the wreckage.
Ukraine hasn’t said anything public about the crash.
The An-26 was created by the Ukrainian aerospace company Antonov during the Soviet era. Its main purpose is military transport, such as moving people and goods over short to medium distances. The plane was first made in the late 1960s, and it has been involved in several deadly accidents since then.
In 2020, 26 people were killed when an An-26 plane crashed in Kharkiv. Most of the victims were military cadets. The next year, there was another crash in Russia’s Far East that killed 28 people. In 2022, there was an accident in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region that killed one person.
After Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine four years ago, fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces is still going on in and around Crimea after the crash. Ukrainian troops have often attacked Russian military bases on the peninsula, which is close to the partly occupied Kherson region in the south of Ukraine.
Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, has asked Russia many times to leave Crimea as part of any peace deal. In November, the US backed a peace plan that said Kyiv would give up control of the peninsula as part of a negotiated solution.
