Anniversary of terrorist attack near Luhansk airport: downing of IL-76

Among the dead was Vitalii Bakhur, a senior lieutenant from Lviv, deputy battery commander and airborne training instructor born in 1989. The soldier was from the village of Zozuli, Zolochiv district. He studied at the Army Academy named after Hetman Petro Sahaidachnyi.

There were also 40 paratroopers of the 25th Detached Dnipro Airborne Brigade and 9 crew members on board.

How the terrorist attack happened

The IL-76 of the 25th Military Transport Aviation Brigade of the Ukrainian Air Force was flying in a three-aircraft formation to Luhansk airport. It was supposed to land second, but was shot down by an Igla MANPADS during landing. On the same day, the Ukrainian Prosecutor's Office classified the incident as a terrorist attack. At that time, the deaths of all 49 military personnel on board became the largest loss since the beginning of the anti-terrorist operation and the largest simultaneous loss of the Ukrainian Armed Forces since independence.

The military took off from Dnipro airport on June 13 at around 11:00 p.m. The runway was unlit due to a power outage at the airport, so Ukrainian paratroopers' armored vehicles and trucks were lined up along the runway and illuminated with headlights to guide the landing aircraft. The first IL-76 landed successfully.

The second IL-76 was attacked during the landing approach at an altitude of about 700 meters. The paratroopers at the airport saw an anti-aircraft missile being fired.

The second missile was fired from the ground. It hit the aircraft, which caught fire in midair, fell on the fuselage and exploded. On the ground, the ammunition also began to burn and explode. The aircraft crashed about 7 kilometers from the airport.

As military observer Mykhailo Zhyrokhov wrote in his article, in the morning a group of soldiers from the 80th Airmobile Brigade, which was in control of the airport at the time, went to the crash site of the IL-76.

“First of all, we were looking for recorders. There were two of them. One was intact, one was broken. The so-called “globes”. There was a disinformation that the cockpit was intact. This is a lie. There was nothing left there. There were wheels, rags of the skin, the remains of a BMD. The tail was still in the field. BMDs are made of aluminum alloy, they melted in the fire. We collected the remains of the soldiers' bodies, gathered the unexploded ammunition and blew it up. And then, after us, the separatists came there, took pictures, posted them on the Internet, and boasted about their work. They were afraid of us, so we took up a circular defense upon arrival, and they kept their distance from us,” the article says. 

After the aircraft crashed, the Ukrainian Armed Forces command, through the Red Cross, negotiated with the militant commanders to take the dead paratroopers out in exchange for the opportunity to take the bodies of the separatists.

The perpetrators of the tragedy

Militants of the terrorist 'Luhansk People's Republic' claimed responsibility for the downing. They explained that the order to close the airspace over Luhansk, issued by one of the self-proclaimed LPR officials, had been violated.

During the investigation into the circumstances of the tragedy, the head of the Main Operational Directorate of the General Staff, Major General Oleksandr Shutov, and several other senior officials were suspended from duty. According to the then acting Minister of Defense Mykhailo Koval, one of the versions of the downing of the plane with 49 military personnel on board in Luhansk is treason on the part of the flight controllers. They could have contributed to the leakage of information about the movement.

According to the special service, “the criminal order was given directly by the commander of the 58th Army of the Russian Armed Forces, Major General Yevgeny Nikiforov,” who was then sent on a business trip to Donbas to perform military tasks. In March 2021, Igor Plotnitsky was found guilty of shooting down a Ukrainian aircraft, and a court in Dnipro sentenced him to life in absentia. In addition to him, militant leaders Aleksandr Gureev and Andrey Patrushev were also sentenced to life in prison.

On January 27, 2022, the Dnipro Court of Appeal upheld the life sentence for former Plotnitsky and the leaders of the Zarya and Vityaz groups, Patrushev and Gureev.