BROVARY, Ukraine (AP) — A helicopter carrying Ukraine’s interior minister crashed Wednesday into a kindergarten in a foggy residential suburb of Kyiv, killing him and a dozen other people, including a child on the ground, authorities said.
Interior Minister Denys Monastyrskyi, who oversaw the country’s police and emergency services, is the highest-ranking official killed since the Russian invasion nearly 11 months ago. His death, along with that of the rest of his ministry’s leadership and the entire helicopter crew, was the second major calamity in four days to befall Ukraine, after a Russian missile struck hit an apartment building in the southeastern city of Dnipro, killing dozens of civilians.
It is not immediately clear whether the helicopter crash, which occurred on a foggy morning in the eastern suburb of the capital, Brovary, was an accident or related to the war. The Ukrainian authorities immediately opened an investigation. No fighting has been reported recently in the capital region.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy – speaking to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, via video link – said the crash had a broad war connection.
“It’s no accident because it’s because of war and war has many dimensions, not just on battlefields,” he said after asking the Davos audience to join him. for a minute of standing silence in honor of those killed. “There are no accidents in wartime. These are all results of war.
Ukraine’s state emergency service, which operated the French-made Super Puma helicopter, said at least 14 people had been killed, including nine in the helicopter and a child on the ground. He said 25 people were injured, including 11 children. The first official reports gave a different number of victims.
At the scene of the crash and subsequent fire, plastic sheeting covered at least four bodies. Workers cleared charred and mangled debris lying against an apartment building and in the kindergarten playground. Some walls have been partly demolished and blackened. The helicopter’s blackened rotors protruded from a wrecked car and rested on the roof of a building’s entrance.
Kyiv Regional Governor Oleksii Kuleba told Ukrainian television that emergency services were still identifying the remains and the death toll could rise.
The crash killed five Interior Ministry officials, a national police official and the three helicopter crew members, Ukraine’s national police said. Monastyrskyi’s deputy Yevhen Yenin and Interior Ministry state secretary Yurii Lubkovych were among the dead, police said.
Monastyrskyi, 42, was in charge of police and emergency services dealing with the aftermath of Russian strikes and mine clearance, political analyst Volodymyr Fesenko told The Associated Press.
Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said National Police Chief Ihor Klymenko had been appointed acting interior minister.
Senior Ukrainian officials routinely travel by helicopter at low altitudes and at high speeds during the conflict, increasing the inherent dangers associated with the flights. The tragedy could prompt Kyiv to institute a rule followed by many countries and companies that senior officials should not fly on the same plane, Fesenko said.
Those responsible for the helicopter were to fly to the Kharkiv region in northeastern Ukraine, local police chief Volodymyr Timoshko said, adding on Facebook that they were “not just leaders “, but “friends I respected”.
The helicopter was sold to Ukraine before the war in 2019, a French defense official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because it was not authorized to be identified, according to the policy of the ministry.
Ukraine’s security service is investigating “all possible versions” of the accident, Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin said on Telegram.
The accident happened at a particularly dark time in the war for Ukraine, just days after the Russian attack on the building in southeastern Ukraine killed 45 people, including six children – the deadliest attack on civilians since the spring.
“The pain is indescribable,” Zelenskyy wrote on Telegram.
“Another very sad day today – more losses,” his wife, Olena Zelenska, said, dabbing teary eyes as she responded to the news at the Davos economic conference, where she rallied support for the ‘Ukraine.
White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby called the crash “heartbreaking.”
British Home Secretary Suella Braverman called Monastyrskyi “a beacon of support for the people of Ukraine during (Russian President Vladimir) Putin’s illegal invasion.” She said she was “struck by his determination, his optimism and his patriotism”.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who faces pressure to send tanks to Ukraine, tweeted that the crash “shows once again the huge price Ukraine has to pay in this war”.
In other developments from Wednesday:
— Putin defended his invasion by offering a variation of the arguments he used previously. He told a group of veterans that Moscow’s actions were aimed at ending a ‘war’ that has been raging since 2014 in eastern Ukraine, where Russian-backed separatists fought Ukrainian forces .
“Everything we are doing today as part of the special military operation is an attempt to stop this war. This is the meaning of our operation – to protect the people who live in these territories,” he said.
Ukraine and its Western allies have rejected Russia’s justification arguments, saying Kyiv poses no threat to Moscow and the invasion was unprovoked.
— Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that Moscow’s goals in Ukraine are “determined by the fundamental legitimate interests of Russia.”
“There must be no military infrastructure in Ukraine that poses a direct threat to our country,” Lavrov said at his annual press conference. He claimed that the goal of Ukraine’s Western allies was to use the conflict to wear down Russia.
– Fighting continued in eastern Ukraine around the town of Bakhmut and the nearby salt mining town of Soledar, according to Donetsk Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko. A total of 14 towns and villages have been shelled in the partially occupied Donetsk region in the past 24 hours, Ukraine’s presidential office said. Two civilians were injured.
He added that Russian forces also shelled residential areas in the southern city of Kherson, which the Kyiv army recaptured in November. Four people were injured.
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Associated Press writers Andrew Meldrum in Kyiv, Angela Charlton in Paris and Yuras Karmanau in Tallinn, Estonia, contributed.
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Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine: https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
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