KYIV: Officials in Ukraine said Russia has provided no credible evidence to back its claims that their own forces shot down a military transport plane carrying Ukrainian prisoners of war who were to be swapped for Russian POWs.
The Ukrainian agency that deals with prisoner exchanges said late Friday that Russian officials had “with great delay” provided it with a list of the 65 Ukrainians who Moscow said had died in the Wednesday plane crash in Russia’s Belgorod region.
Ukraine’s Coordination Staff for the Treatment of Prisoners of War said relatives of the named POWs were unable to identify their loved ones in crash site photos provided by Russian authorities. The agency’s update cited Ukraine’s military intelligence chief, Lt. Col. Kyrylo Budanov, as saying that Kyiv had no verifiable information about who was on the plane.
The Russian Defense Ministry said Wednesday that missiles fired from across the border brought down the transport plane that it said was taking the POWs back to Ukraine. Local authorities in Belgorod, which borders Ukraine, said the crash killed all 74 people onboard, including six crew members and three Russian servicemen.
“We currently don’t have evidence that there could have been that many people onboard the aircraft. Russian propaganda’s claim that the IL-76 aircraft was transporting 65 Ukrainian POWs (heading) for a prisoner swap continues to raise a lot of questions,” Budanov said.
Social media users in the Belgorod region posted a video Wednesday that showed a plane falling from the sky in a snowy, rural area, and a huge ball of fire erupting where it apparently hit the ground.
Kyiv has neither confirmed nor denied that its forces downed a Russian military transport plane that day, and Russia’s claim that the crash killed Ukrainian POWs could not be independently verified. Earlier Friday, Mykola Oleshchuk, Ukraine’s air force commander, described Moscow’s assertion as “rampant Russian propaganda.”
Ukrainian officials earlier this week confirmed that a prisoner swap was due to happen Wednesday but said it was called off. They said Moscow did not ask for any specific stretch of airspace to be kept safe for a certain length of time, as it has for past prisoner exchanges.
An International Committee of the Red Cross spokesperson in Ukraine urged Russia on Friday night to return the bodies of any POWs who might have died in the plane crash.
In a live interview with the US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Red Cross Media Relations Officer Oleksandr Vlasenko also remarked that “very little time” had passed between the initial reports of the incident and Moscow declaring it was ready to return the bodies of the Ukrainian POWs.
While Ukraine and Russia regularly exchange the bodies of dead soldiers, each trade has required considerable preparation, Vlasenko said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has called for an international investigation into the crash. Russia has sole access to the crash site.
Russian President Vladimir Putin pledged Friday to make the findings of Moscow’s crash investigation public. In his first public remarks on the incident, Putin repeated previous comments by Russian officials that “everything was planned” for a prisoner exchange that day when the aircraft went down.
“Knowing (the POWs were aboard), they attacked this plane. I don’t know whether they did it on purpose or by mistake, through thoughtlessness,” Putin said of Ukraine at a meeting with students in St. Petersburg.
He offered no details to support the allegation that Kyiv was to blame, but said the plane’s flight recorders had been found.
“There are black boxes, everything will now be collected and shown,” Putin said.
As the war nears its two-year mark, Ukraine is eager to demonstrate momentum to the United States and other Western allies supplying the country with weapons and other aid. A counter-offensive last year to seize Russian-occupied areas did not produce major gains.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba met with his Lithuanian counterpart in Kyiv on Saturday, During a joint news conference, the two cited progress on joint drone production and reviving a European Union fund to pay for military aid after the bloc’s leaders in December postponed an agreement to top it up.
Kuleba said there was “clear understanding” between him and Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis on how to provide more drones for the Ukrainian army.
“Lithuania has the technology; we have the ability to scale production. That was the key topic,” he said.
Kuleba and Landsbergis also said that Kyiv and its EU partners were inching closer to making more funds from the European Peace Facility available for long-term weapons, ammunition and other military aid deliveries for Ukraine. The EU set up the fund in 2021 to finance conflict resolution and security initiatives
Some EU members, including Germany and France, have said the 27-nation bloc needs to rethink how it sources the weapons it transfers to Ukraine. They have mentioned switching away from supplying arms from the national stocks of individual countries and toward a direct procurement process.
Lithuania, an eastern European nation that spent decades under Russian and Soviet domination, has been one of Ukraine’s staunchest allies since Moscow launched its full-scale war in February 2022. Landsbergis pledged that support from the government in Vilnius would continue.
“We’ll never pay the price that you’re paying for security,” he said, addressing Kuleba and Ukrainian society. “And so ... I can only apologize that we only can do so much, but we will still be doing what we can.”
Ukraine says it has no evidence for Russia’s claim that dozens of POWs died in a shot down plane
https://arab.news/bqph3
Ukraine says it has no evidence for Russia’s claim that dozens of POWs died in a shot down plane
- Ukraine’s Coordination Staff for the Treatment of Prisoners of War said relatives of the named POWs were unable to identify their loved ones
- The agency’s update cited Ukraine’s military intelligence chief, Lt. Col. Kyrylo Budanov, as saying that Kyiv had no verifiable information about who was on the plane
Italian police fire tear gas as protesters clash near Winter Olympics hockey venue
- Police vans behind a temporary metal fence secured the road to the athletes’ village, but the protest veered away, continuing on a trajectory toward the Santagiulia venue
MILAN: Italian police fired tear gas and a water cannon at dozens of protesters who threw firecrackers and tried to access a highway near a Winter Olympics venue on Saturday.
The brief confrontation came at the end of a peaceful march by thousands against the environmental impact of the Games and the presence of US agents in Italy.
Police held off the violent demonstrators, who appeared to be trying to reach the Santagiulia Olympic ice hockey rink, after the skirmish. By then, the larger peaceful protest, including families with small children and students, had dispersed.
Earlier, a group of masked protesters had set off smoke bombs and firecrackers on a bridge overlooking a construction site about 800 meters (a half-mile) from the Olympic Village that’s housing around 1,500 athletes.
Police vans behind a temporary metal fence secured the road to the athletes’ village, but the protest veered away, continuing on a trajectory toward the Santagiulia venue. A heavy police presence guarded the entire route.
There was no indication that the protest and resulting road closure interfered with athletes’ transfers to their events, all on the outskirts of Milan.
The demonstration coincided with US Vice President JD Vance’s visit to Milan as head of the American delegation that attended the opening ceremony on Friday.
He and his family visited Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” closer to the city center, far from the protest, which also was against the deployment of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to provide security to the US delegation.
US Homeland Security Investigations, an ICE unit that focuses on cross-border crimes, frequently sends its officers to overseas events like the Olympics to assist with security. The ICE arm at the forefront of the immigration crackdown in the US is known as Enforcement and Removal Operations, and there is no indication its officers are being sent to Italy.
At the larger, peaceful demonstration, which police said numbered 10,000, people carried cardboard cutouts to represent trees felled to build the new bobsled run in Cortina. A group of dancers performed to beating drums. Music blasted from a truck leading the march, one a profanity-laced anti-ICE anthem.
“Let’s take back the cities and free the mountains,” read a banner by a group calling itself the Unsustainable Olympic Committee. Another group called the Association of Proletariat Excursionists organized the cutout trees.
“They bypassed the laws that usually are needed for major infrastructure project, citing urgency for the Games,” said protester Guido Maffioli, who expressed concern that the private entity organizing the Games would eventually pass on debt to Italian taxpayers.
Homemade signs read “Get out of the Games: Genocide States, Fascist Police and Polluting Sponsors,” the final one a reference to fossil fuel companies that are sponsors of the Games. One woman carried an artificial tree on her back decorated with the sign: “Infernal Olympics.”
The demonstration followed another last week when hundreds protested the deployment of ICE agents.
Like last week, demonstrators Saturday said they were opposed to ICE agents’ presence, despite official statements that a small number of agents from an investigative arm would be present in US diplomatic territory, and not operational on the streets.
