Ukraine killed its own soldiers on purpose, Russia’s UN envoy has said
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.
Preliminary investigation has 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.
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