At least 22 people, including military cadets, were killed and two others were seriously injured on Friday when a Ukrainian air force plane crashed near Kharkiv in the east of the country, the Ukrainian Ministry of the Interior said.
Ukrainian Deputy Minister of the Interior Anton Gerashchenko confirmed the death toll to reporters, describing the incident as a “shock” and saying that the cause of the crash was being investigated.
Footage of the crash released by officials on social media showed the smoldering remains of the Antonov-26 transport plane.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“Most of [the dead] were students” of the Kharkiv National Air Force University, the air force said in a statement.
There were 27 people on board, 20 cadets and seven crew, it added. Twenty-two have been confirmed dead, two are injured and “the search for three more people continues,” the emergency services said.
The injured are in a “critical” condition, regional governor Oleksiy Kucher said on Facebook.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy described the crash as a “terrible tragedy” and said that he would travel to the Kharkiv region yesterday.
“We are urgently creating a commission to investigate all the circumstances and causes of the tragedy,” he wrote on Facebook.
The plane crashed at about 8:50pm 2km from the Chuguev military air base, the emergency services said.
In photographs released by the emergency services, firefighters in reflective clothing sprayed aircraft debris with jets of water.
The body of the plane burst into flames on landing and firefighters were able to extinguish the blaze after an hour.
The town of Chuguev is about 30km southeast of Kharkiv and 100km west of the front line where government forces are fighting pro-Russian separatists.
The transport plane crashed during a training flight, the Ukrainian presidency said, citing preliminary information.
EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell sent his condolences on behalf of the bloc.
“My thoughts are with the families and friends of those who lost their lives,” he wrote on Twitter.
Several military planes have crashed in Ukraine during training flights in the past few years.
A pilot was killed in December 2018 after his Su-27 fighter crashed during landing in the Zhytomyr region.
Two months earlier, the same model of fighter crashed in a neighboring region during the Clear Sky 2018 joint military exercises between Ukraine and NATO countries, killing the US and Ukrainian pilots on board.
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RIVALRY: ‘We know that these are merely symbolic investigations initiated by China, which is in fact the world’s most profligate disrupter of supply chains,’ a US official said China has started a pair of investigations into US trade practices, retaliating against similar probes by US President Donald Trump’s administration as the superpowers stake out positions before an expected presidential summit in May. The move, announced by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce on Friday, is a direct mirror of steps Trump took to revive his tariff agenda after the US Supreme Court last month struck down some of his duties. “China expresses its strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition to these actions,” a ministry spokesperson said in a statement, referring to the so-called Section 301 investigations initiated on March 11.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
RSS