A senior Russian air force commander was among 30 people killed last week when a military transport aircraft crashed in Russian-controlled Crimea, according to a senior official cited by Russian media on Monday.
Alexander Otroshchenko, commander of the 45th Army of the Northern Fleet’s Air Force and Air Defence, died in the incident, Andrei Chibis, governor of the northern Murmansk region where the fleet is based, was quoted as saying.
The An-26 aircraft was conducting a scheduled flight over the peninsula, which Russia seized from Ukraine in 2014, when military officials lost contact with the plane around 6pm on Tuesday.
Russia’s Defence Ministry stated shortly afterwards that the preliminary cause was a technical malfunction.
Sources at the crash site, speaking to state news agencies Tass and RIA Novosti, confirmed that the plane plummeted into a cliff face.
The Investigative Committee previously said it has launched a criminal probe on the charges of violating flight regulations, and a search operation was underway in a mountainous forested area in Crimea.
“There was no impact on the aircraft,” TASS quoted the ministry as saying, implying that objects like missiles, drones and birds were not involved.
“The preliminary cause of the crash is a technical malfunction. A commission from the military is working at the site,” it said.
The An-26 model, which has been in service since the late 1960s and is also used by airlines for freight, has been involved in a number of deadly crashes over the last decade.
This includes a Ukrainian An-26 that crashed during a flight in the southeastern Zaporizhzhia region in 2022, killing one person.
Another aircraft of the same model crashed on a training flight in northeastern Ukraine in 2020, killing all but one of the 27 people on board.
Eight people, including five Russians, were killed when an An-26 crashed in South Sudan in 2020. Four of 10 people on board were killed when an An-26 crashed on landing in Ivory Coast in West Africa in 2017.
