The French military has concluded that Ukrainian forces used an American-supplied Patriot air defense system to shoot down a Russian plane carrying prisoners of war, an official told the Associated Press on Friday. Russian investigators have reached the same verdict.

The plane, a Russian Il-76, was shot down over Belgorod Region last Wednesday while carrying 65 captured Ukrainian servicemen who were set to take part in a prisoner swap later that day. All of the POWs, as well as three Russian officers and six crew members, died in the crash.

A French military official told the Associated Press that a Patriot air defense battery was used to target the plane from around 50 kilometers away. Ukrainian forces surreptitiously moved the battery into range before turning on its radar “just long enough to hit [the plane],” the official said.

With an initial search of the crash site suggesting that a French missile may have been used to commit the attack, sources within the French military have already been telling the media for more than a week that the missile involved was American.

In a report released on Thursday, Russia’s Investigative Committee concluded that the plane was brought down using two MIM-104A surface-to-air missiles launched from a Patriot battery near the Ukrainian village of Liptsy. Liptsy is located in Kharkov Region, around 10km from the Russian border.

Missile fragments found at the blast site bore English-language inscriptions, which revealed that the two projectiles were from a batch made in the 1980s. One piece read “Raytheon,” a reference to the US arms maker that jointly designed the Patriot system.

Following the Investigative Committee’s report, a source within Russia’s security services told TASS that it is very likely that there were American specialists among the crew operating the system.

(non-archive source: https://www.rt.com/russia/591734-france-ukraine-patriot-missile/ )

  • notceps [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    42·
    9 months ago

    Again stop this just think about it, if Russia has no one on board what are they going to do if the plane doesn’t get shot down. Like you are literally just shooting at a wall then drawing a bullseye around it, ukraine can’t be at fault so let me create a scenario where they didn’t shoot POWs. I’ll repeat it again if Ukraine doesn’t shoot down this one plane that for all they know is carrying POWs then this plane would land at the exchange place and the ukrainian side could just see that no one was on the plane and they could accuse russia of baiting an international scene of all kinds of things really. This is just not a thing russia is going to do unless they 100% know that it will get shot down which would mean that they already have tons of people working for them on the ukranian side and if they did why would they shoot down a plane with a patriot missile system instead of just destroying it.

    If you apply just a tiny bit of logic all theories it all falls apart when the plan doesn’t go as planned and I think at this point Russia knows that a plan doesn’t always go the way they want it to.

    Again I don’t care what the ukrainian government says they to this day don’t claim responsibility for the rocket that killed two polish farmers after pretty much every western nation told them “This one was yours.” they just continued to say “Nuh uh” and you are still going “Well I don’t know guys I’ll just trust them on this one tho” do you need to trust what the russians say? No, but you can just try to think this through and come to the conclusion that ukrainians shot down a plane carrying ukrainian POWs.

    • raunz@mander.xyz
      122·
      9 months ago

      You should research where the plane was shot down and in which direction it was flying.

      • notceps [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        421·
        9 months ago

        No? Why don’t you put a similar amount of effort into this convo? If you want to bring it up bring it up properly instead of this vagueposting, oh no wait if you post some dodgy website like the one you did before then I can mock you for basically doing the anti-vaxxer thing where you’ll just scour the internet for the one voice that agrees with you?

        You mean like how that media outlet said ‘It’s deboonked’ even though ukranian government officials say that the people on that list were supposed to be exchanged on that day

        again this is ukranian sources the list is real but they claim that there was nobody on the plane. I don’t know maybe russia just likes to play coy and as a lark sent an empty plane and was going to suprise them and then say “Gotcha man your face when you thought there was supposed to be a prisoner exchange we got you so good” but sadly they couldn’t do this practical joke because ukr shot down the plane.