A Russian Ilyushin-76 military
transport plane has crashed in the southern Belgorod region bordering Ukraine.
Russia's ministry of defence said 65 captured
Ukrainian military were on the plane heading to Belgorod region for a prisoner
exchange.
None of the details surrounding those on board
can be independently verified.
Ria Novosti news agency said another nine people
were on the plane, including six crew.
Ukraine's general staff, quoted by the
Ukrainska Pravda website, said the plane was transporting missiles for Russia's
S-300 air defence systems. It made no mention of prisoners of war.
Video shared on social media showed a plane
going down followed by an explosion and a fireball near the village of
Yablonovo, 70km (44 miles) to the north-east of the city of Belgorod, at around
11:00 local time (08:00 GMT).
The regional governor in Russia's Belgorod
region, Vyacheslav Gladkov, said the plane crashed in a field near a
residential area and that everyone on board had died.
Some Ukrainian media suggested initially that
the Il-76 may have been downed by Ukrainian forces, but those reports were
later deleted.
Ukraine's general staff told reporters that it
did not have accurate information about the situation and that it was
investigating the circumstances.
The Ukrainian government body in charge of
prisoners of war warned that Russia was "actively carrying out special
information operations against Ukraine, which are aimed at destabilising
Ukrainian society".
Andrei Kartapolov, the chairman of Russia's
parliamentary defence committee, claimed later that there had been a second
plane in the air transporting 80 Ukrainian prisoners, although that plane had
then changed course.
"There can now be no talk of any other
[prisoner] exchanges," Mr Kartapolov told Russian TV.
Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov
said the Kremlin was aware of the crash but refused to go in to details.
A nationwide air raid alert was briefly in
place across Ukraine shortly after news of the Il-76 crash emerged.
Belgorod, which is located approximately 25
miles (40km) north of the border with Ukraine, has suffered dozens of
casualties from air strikes and drones since the war in Ukraine began.
In December, 25 people were killed and 100
were injured following an air strike - although Ukraine insisted that only
military infrastructure had been targeted and blamed Russian air defences for
fragments falling on the city.
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