Ukraine Shoots Down Russian Plane Carrying 67 Ukrainian Military Prisoners of War

The Il-76 Soviet-designed military aircraft had left from an undetermined site yesterday morning and had been carrying 65 Ukrainian soldiers who were prisoners of war in the Ukraine-Russian conflict.

It was a flight Russian officials said was “scheduled” and was one Ukraine should have been aware of. It was carrying a group of POWs between where they had been held captive and a reported staging area where the prisoners would be readied for exchange with Russian prisoners currently held by Ukraine.

The Ostorozhno Novosti news service which publishes via the Telegram social media application said after the attack that the names of the prisoners said to have been on the plane were a mix of regular Ukrainian soldiers, who had been taken captive by Russia both in 2022 and 2023. The list of soldiers was confirmed in parallel via the Russian RT news service in their own Telegram channel news release.

They had been authorized for release in a prisoner swap some months ago but negotiations had made it impossible to set up an appropriate swap until now.

According to Andrei Kartapolov, who heads the lower-house State Duma's Defense Committee, the Il-76 plane was “downed by three rockets… either [American -made] Patriot or German-made Iris-T” missiles.

“Ukraine’s leadership was well aware of preparations for the [POW] exchange, was informed about how the prisoners would be sent,” Katapolov said.

This flight was in fact one of two such flights Ukraine had been informed was going to happen. According to the Russian lawmaker, a second Russian plane flying a considerable distance behind the one that was shot down was carrying another 80 prisoners-of-war which would have been released as part of the same planned exchange.

“Now we can’t talk about an exchange,” the State Duma Defense Committee chairperson said.

The second of the two Russian planes carrying those Ukrainian prisoners was ordered to turn around after that missile attack on the first.

Ukraine has confirmed it was readying for the original exchange and had already delivered its Russian prisoners to the transfer site. The Kyiv government acknowledged the handoff was to have happened sometime on January 24.

The plane’s path may have carried it over part of Ukraine but was over Russian or other territories for most of its route, according to Russian military sources. The flight was traveling away from the Ukrainian border at the time of the attack.

After one or more of the missiles struck the craft, it exploded in a fireball in the air according to witnesses, then came down and crashed just under 50 kilometers (31 miles) from the border of Ukraine. The wreckage was discovered in Belgorod, located in western Russia.

“There were 65 captured servicemen of the [Ukrainian Armed Forces], six crew members and three escorts,” a spokesperson from the Russian Defense Ministry said after the missile attack.

The Ministry said Ukrainian military forces stationed in Kharkiv, not far across the border from Belgorod, had fired the missiles.

Vyacheslav Gladkov, governor of the Belgorod region, had issued a rocket attack alert covering near where the Il-76 aircraft was flying, about one hour before the plane came down.

The Russian Defense Ministry called the takedown of the flight carrying the about-to-be-released prisoners a “terrorist attack”.

Officially, the Ukraine government has refused to either confirm or deny that it had anything to do with the shooting down of the Russian aircraft. Privately, however, several anonymous senior officials within Ukraine’s military said the attack on the plane was indeed “their job”. Those officials said the plane had been targeted and shot down because it was carrying S-300 anti-aircraft missiles at the time it was first spotted early yesterday.

Ukraine military sources also denied knowing who might have been on board the downed plane, even after Russia issued its own extensive information on who had died in the incident. It said it was still lacking “reliable and comprehensive” information about the flight as of late yesterday.

“According to the agreement [made regarding the prisoner exchange, the Russian side had to ensure the safety of our defenders,” Ukraine’s GUR military intelligence agency said in a statement about the air attack. “The Ukrainian side was not informed about the need to ensure the safety of the airspace around ​​the city of Belgorod for a certain period of time, as was repeatedly done in the past.”

“This may indicate deliberate actions by Russia aimed at creating a threat to the life and safety of the prisoners,” it said.

Despite the sensitivity about what had happened both for Russia and the people of Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky wasted no time using what happened as an excuse to ratchet up tensions between the nations.

In his nightly video address, Zelensky did not apologize for the crash or acknowledge any complicity in what happened. Though he did say his government was seeking further information about what happened, he focused all the blame on Moscow.

“It is clear that the Russians are playing with the lives of Ukrainian prisoners, the feelings of their loved ones and the emotions of our society.”

Later the same day, Ukraine military authorities said in a prepared statement they had information saying Russia transport aircraft like these were known to have been carrying missiles to Belgorod during earlier runs. They said the missiles were being transported to facilitate cross-border attacks on Ukraine from that region.

“With this in mind, the Ukrainian armed forces will continue to take measures to destroy delivery vehicles and control airspace to eliminate the terrorist threat, including in the Belgorod-Kharkiv direction,” those authorities explained.

So far Ukraine still has not admitted being behind the missile attack on this specific plane. The agency responsible for the prisoner exchange plans did urge caution to the Ukrainian people not to get drawn in by “enemy propaganda … about the crash”.

During a special plenary session of Russia’s parliament, the Duma, Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin spoke with anger about the attack.

“They shot their own soldiers in the air. Their own,” Volodin told lawmakers in a plenary session. “Our pilots, who were carrying out a humanitarian mission, were shot down.”

In view of information he had received that the plane had been shot down by both American and German missiles, Speaker Volodin said he had directed the Duma to complain directly to the United States Congress and the Germany's Bundestag, over their role in what happened since it was their weapons which brought down the plane.

“The lawmakers of these countries need to recognize their responsibility, what all of this is leading to,” Volodin said.

After some hours, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov issued his own statement in which he declared the destruction of the military transport aircraft and the killing of all onboard as a “Ukrainian criminal act”.

Lavrov formally notified the United Nations Security Council of the immediate need to meet to discuss the missile attack on the Russian Il-76 transport plane. A meeting is currently scheduled to begin on this at 5 PM Eastern Time on January 25.

It is not known if Ukraine shooting down the plane was just due to stupidity of the Ukrainian dictatorship or if it was some sort of insane version of the Zionist Hannibal Directive in which Jews kill their own people so they can't be taken hostage, as was blatantly demonstrated in Israel on October 7 when Israeli forces killed hundreds of Jews and then tried to blame it on Hamas. It was only when video and eyewitness testimonies surfaced that the truth became known. Despite the irrefutable evidence, the mad Israeli government is still refusing to admit what it did.