Secret Service responds – plane crash: has Ukraine fallen into a trap?

Initially it was clearly confirmed that a planned prisoner exchange for Wednesday, which Russia also discussed, had failed. “Today a prisoner exchange should have taken place, but it did not take place,” Ukraine’s military intelligence service HUR said early in the evening. Kiev has not confirmed the Kremlin’s version that the Ukrainian prisoners were aboard the plane that crashed in the Russian border region of Belgorod and are now dead. Instead, the statement said there was “no reliable and comprehensive information about who exactly and how many were on board the aircraft.”

“Were not informed”
Ukraine, in turn, complied with all agreements and brought the Russian soldiers to the exchange site on time, the secret service said. It continued: “According to the agreement, the Russian side had to guarantee the safety of our defenders. At the same time, the Ukrainian side was not informed about the need to guarantee the safety of the airspace in the area around the city of Belgorod for a certain period of time, as was done several times in the past.”

It is common to transport prisoners of war by plane, train or road. This time, however, no one was informed about the exact Russian mode of transport, the number of vehicles or the routes. This “could indicate deliberate actions by Russia aimed at endangering the lives and safety of prisoners,” HUR wrote.

Murder confirmed?
Many observers – including Russian state media – see the statement as indirect confirmation that Ukraine shot down the military plane with its own soldiers on board. However, there has been no official confirmation from Kiev.

Because landing a transport plane in a 30-kilometer combat zone cannot be safe, such an action “must certainly be discussed by both sides, otherwise it would jeopardize the entire exchange process,” the report said.

Has a trap been set?
“On this basis, one could speak of planned and deliberate actions by Russia to destabilize the situation in Ukraine and weaken international support for our state,” the HUR statement said. This raises the serious accusation that Russia deliberately set a trap for Ukraine, knowing that its air defenses would shoot down a plane that was not intended to transport prisoners of war.

According to the Russian government, the plane was knocked out of the sky by two Ukrainian missiles. The Kremlin is exploiting the incident for its propaganda, saying that with this attack the Ukrainian leadership has shown “its true colors” by showing no respect for the lives of its own citizens (see video above). According to the Russian Defense Ministry, all 74 people on board were killed – 65 of them Ukrainian prisoners of war who were said to have been exchanged for captured Russian soldiers at a border crossing with Ukraine that afternoon.

Many questions unanswered
In the meantime, many questions still remain unanswered. There is no answer as to why no bodies can be seen at the crash site, or why the plane was apparently headed to Iran the day before. According to the Ukrainian General Staff, the plane was supposed to deliver S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to the front. However, there is still no independent information about who or what the plane was carrying. The only thing that remains certain is that an Ilyushin Il-76 plane crashed near the village of Jablonovo in Russia’s western Belgorod Oblast on Wednesday.