Sputnik Editor-in-Chief Posted List of Ukrainian PoWs From Downed Il-76 Aircraft

Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in chief of RT and the Rossiya Segodnya media group — Sputnik's parent company — shared via Telegram a list of Ukrainian prisoners of war who were on board the Il-76 transport plane shot down by Ukrainian missiles over Russian Belgorod Region.

Simonyan posted a photo of a spreadsheet with the names and dates of birth of Ukrainian soldiers being transported for the prisoner exchange.

According to the Russian Defense Ministry, the plane was flying from the Chkalovsky air base near Moscow to Belgorod. It was shot down in the Belgorod region at 08:15 GMT. Before the crash, the radar systems of the Russian Aerospace Forces detected the launch of two Ukrainian anti-aircraft missiles from the area of the Liptsy settlement in the Kharkov region.

A total of 65 Ukrainian prisoners of war, six crew members and three escorts were on board, none of whom survived.

The defense ministry emphasized that Kiev knew about the transportation of servicemen for the upcoming exchange.

According to Russian Duma defense committee head Andrey Kartapolov, the Ukrainian Armed Forces shot down the plane either with the American Patriot system or the German IRIS-T. Viktor Bondarev, the first deputy chairman of the Federation Council’s Defense and Security Committee, reported that the crew managed to report an external impact before the aircraft crashed.