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Ukrainian troops have shot down a Russian military plane carrying Ukrainian soldiers in order to derail an upcoming prisoner swap, Moscow’s envoy told the UN Security Council on Thursday.
The Il-76 cargo aircraft crashed in Russia’s border region of Belgorod on Wednesday morning, killing everyone on board. According to the Russian Defense Ministry, the plane was transporting 65 Ukrainian POWs slated for exchange that was to take place later that day.
“All currently available data points to a deliberate, premeditated crime,” said Dmitry Polyansky, Russia’s deputy representative to the UN. “The Ukrainian leadership was well aware about the route and means by which [the Ukrainian] soldiers would have been transported to the agreed exchange point.”
“It was not the first such operation. However, for some inexplicable reason, the regime in Kiev had decided this time to sabotage [the swap] in the most barbaric way,” the diplomat said.
According to Polyansky, the aircraft was destroyed by a surface-to-air missile fired from the village of Liptsy in the Kharkov region of eastern Ukraine. Preliminary investigation found that Ukraine used either the US-made Patriot missiles or the German-made IRIS-T, he added.
“If this is confirmed, the Western countries that supplied [the missile] will be directly complicit in this crime, just as they are complicit in Ukraine’s shelling of peaceful neighborhoods of Russian cities using Western weapons,” Polyansky told the council.
Kiev confirmed that a prisoner swap was scheduled to take place the same day the plane was downed, while the Ukrainian Defense Ministry said that it considers all Russian military aircraft legitimate targets. In his video address on Wednesday night, President Vladimir Zelensky called for an international probe into the incident. He did not say who was responsible for downing the Il-76, however.
Addressing the Security Council, Ukraine’s deputy envoy Kristina Gayovishin stopped short of directly blaming Russia for shooting down the plane carrying the POWs. At the same time, she argued that “Russia bears full responsibility for all atrocities, deaths and destruction caused by the war.”
Gayovishin added that Ukrainian troops will continue to target Il-76s and other Russian military planes, including those operating in the “Belgorod-Kharkov direction.”
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