The speaker of the lower house of the Russian parliament (Duma) accused Ukraine this Wednesday of shooting down an Il-76 plane carrying 65 Ukrainian prisoners.
“They killed their own soldiers in the air, mothers and children were waiting for them,” Vyacheslav Volodin said on air in Moscow, as quoted by the French agency AFP.
The Russian government said an Il-76 military transport plane with 74 people on board, including 65 Ukrainians for a prisoner exchange, crashed this Wednesday in the Belgorod region near the border with Ukraine.
“They shot down our pilots who were carrying out a humanitarian mission (…) with American and German missiles,” Volodin accused before Russian deputies.
Volodin said that the Duma will prepare an appeal to the US Congress and the German Federal Parliament to find out which missiles could have caused the plane crash.
The head of the Duma said that the initiative is aimed at ensuring that American congressmen and German deputies “finally see who they are funding and who they are helping.”
“This is a Nazi regime. (…) They must take responsibility, and deputies must blame them,” Volodin said, as quoted by the official Russian TASS news agency.
The accident occurred around 11 a.m. in Moscow (8 a.m. in Lisbon).
“On board were 65 prisoners of war of the Ukrainian army transported to the Belgorod region for exchange, six crew members and three accompanying persons,” the Russian Ministry of Defense said in a statement, quoted by TASS.
Author: Lusa
Source: CM Jornal
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