MOSCOW – A high-ranking Russian military officer perished in a fatal aircraft accident that claimed 30 lives in Russian-occupied Crimea last week, according to statements from Russian officials reported Monday.
Alexander Otroshchenko, who led the 45th Army of the Northern Fleet’s Air Force and Air Defence units, was among those who died in the incident, according to Andrei Chibis, the governor of Russia’s northern Murmansk region where the fleet operates.
The military transport An-26 aircraft struck a cliff in Crimea on March 31. Russia’s Defence Ministry reported soon after the incident that initial investigations pointed to technical failure as the likely cause.
The An-26 aircraft model entered military service in the late 1960s and has also been utilized by commercial carriers for cargo operations, though the aircraft type has been linked to several fatal incidents in recent years.
In 2022, a Ukrainian An-26 went down in Ukraine’s southeastern Zaporizhzhia region, resulting in one fatality. Two years earlier, another aircraft of the same model crashed during a training mission in northeastern Ukraine, killing 26 of the 27 individuals aboard.
An An-26 crash in South Sudan in 2020 killed eight people, including five Russian nationals. In 2017, four out of 10 passengers died when an An-26 crashed while attempting to land in Ivory Coast in West Africa.
