A large Russian military transport plane crashed on Wednesday in the Belgorod region near the border with Ukraine, killing everyone on board, the Russian defence ministry said in a statement, accusing Ukraine of shooting down the plane with missiles.

The defence ministry said the plane had been carrying 65 Ukrainian prisoners of war who were being transferred to the region from a military airport near Moscow to be exchanged for Russian service personnel. It accused Ukrainian forces of launching two missiles from the nearby Kharkiv region of Ukraine that struck the aircraft. The plane was also carrying six crew members and three other individuals, the ministry said.

The Russian claims could not be independently verified.

Officials in Ukraine did not comment directly on Moscow’s accusations that Ukraine shot down the plane but the military’s general staff headquarters issued a statement on Wednesday afternoon asserting a right to target Russian military transport airplanes in the border region.

The statement, posted on the military command’s Facebook page, did not deny shooting down the plane. It said that repeated Russian missile strikes on the city of Kharkiv and the surrounding region had in the past week killed 16 people and wounded another 78 people and that Ukraine had responded by targeting missile launch sites and the logistics for missile deliveries.

“The armed forces of Ukraine will continue to take measures to destroy delivery vehicles and control the airspace to eliminate the terrorist threat,” the statement said.

The Belgorod region of Russia has a long border with Ukraine. Over the past few weeks, it has been the scene of frequent Ukrainian attacks, including a missile bombardment in December. It was also the staging ground for Moscow’s full-scale invasion in 2022 and for further Russian strikes against Ukrainian territory during the war.

The governor of the Belgorod region, Vyacheslav Gladkov, said on social media that the plane had crashed in a field near a settlement in the Korochansky district. He said that emergency services were at the site. A video posted to Telegram and verified by The New York Times showed a large plane crashing and exploding in Yablonovo, a town in the Korochansky district. Tass, a Russian state news agency, published a video of the scene of the crash showing debris littering a snowy field.

New York Times News Service