Newsletters
A Russian An-26 military transport aircraft crashed in Crimea during a scheduled routine flight, killing all 29 people on board, including six crew members and 23 passengers, Russia’s Defense Ministry said, according to state news agencies Tass, RIA Novosti and Interfax.
The aircraft lost contact with authorities at around 6 p.m. local time (3 p.m. GMT) on Tuesday while flying over the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014. A search and rescue operation later located the wreckage at the crash site.
Officials said the plane crashed into a cliff, and there were no reports of any survivors.
Initial assessments indicated that the crash was likely caused by a technical malfunction, according to the defence ministry.
Authorities said there was no evidence of external damage to the aircraft, implying that missiles, drones or birds were not involved in the incident.
A military commission has been dispatched to the crash site to investigate the cause.
The An-26 is a Soviet-era military transport aircraft manufactured by Ukrainian aerospace company Antonov and has been in service since the late 1960s. It is used to transport cargo and smaller numbers of passengers over short- to medium-range distances.
The aircraft model has been involved in several deadly crashes in recent years. In 2020, a Ukrainian An-26 crashed in Kharkiv, killing 26 people, most of them cadets.
In 2021, 28 people were killed in a crash in Russia’s Far East, while another incident in 2022 in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region left one person dead. Other crashes include incidents in South Sudan in 2020 and the Ivory Coast in 2017.
The crash occurred in Crimea, a peninsula in the Black Sea annexed by Russia from Ukraine in 2014.
Fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces has continued in the region since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion, with Ukrainian strikes largely targeting Russian military bases in the peninsula, which borders the partly Russian-occupied Kherson region.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has repeatedly called for Russia to withdraw from Crimea as part of any ceasefire, while a U.S.-backed peace plan proposed in November suggested Kyiv would cede control of the peninsula.
Set as preferred source
Set as preferred source
1 min read
1 min read
