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.
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