Thirteen individuals, including three children and three adults, fell to their deaths from a blazing apartment building after a Russian military jet crashed close to it and set it on fire.
On Monday evening, a Sukhoi 34 fighter-bomber took off from an airstrip in the southern Russian city of Yeysk, close the Ukrainian border. Moments later, the aircraft crashed into the ground in front of an apartment building, dousing the building in blazing fuel.
Firefighters who spent the night extinguishing the wildfire reported early Tuesday morning that 13 people perished in the ensuing conflagration and 68 others were evacuated from the building, 19 of whom required medical attention for a variety of injuries.
Both pilots ejected safely, and film shows one of them resting on the ground close with his parachute still connected. The Russian military stated that the personnel were participating in training at the time of the incident, and the pilot can be heard disputing that the aircraft was shot down as civilians attempt to assist him.
Since the beginning of the war, Putin’s battered air force has now suffered ten non-combat crashes. After failing to eliminate Kyiv’s air defenses, his pilots have also failed to destroy Ukraine’s considerably smaller air force and are restricted to flying behind Russian lines.
Yesterday evening, a Russian Su-34 fighter/bomber plane crashed adjacent to an apartment complex in the city of Yeysk, lighting the structure on fire as the pilots ejected (right)
Video captured one of the pilots on the ground, still hooked to his parachute, shortly after the accident (left) and denying that the plane was shot down (right) as onlookers attempted to assist him.
Su-34 fighter-bomber aircraft of Russia
The Sukhoi Su-34 is a supersonic fighter-bomber aircraft manufactured in Russia.
It was designed in the 1990s to replace its aging predecessor, the Su-24, but Russia’s air force did not adopt it in large numbers until far into the 2000s.
The Su-34 is a multirole aircraft that is primarily designed to attack ground and surface targets with missiles and bombs, but is also capable of engaging in air-to-air combat.
Nonetheless, it has a reputation for being prone to accidents.
Two pairs of Su-34s collided during training exercises on two separate occasions in 2019, while a fifth Su-34 crashed on a training mission in 2020.
Footage showing the pilot lying on the ground appears to capture the sounds of explosions in the background, generating rumors on Russian social media that the jet was actually on a combat mission and that its ammo detonated after it crashed.
However, the regional governor of Krasnodar, Veniamin Kondratyev, rejected this, stating that the explosions were caused by the rupture of fuel tanks.
The fire was eventually doused with the assistance of 410 firefighters and emergency services personnel, according to the Russian news source Zvezdanews.
Deputy governor Anna Minkova said that more beds were being provided for injured civilians, adding, “Specialists from regional burn departments have been sent to Yeysk.”
The Kremlin said the state-run news agency TASS that Russian President Vladimir Putin was informed of the fire and ordered that “all necessary assistance be given to victims of the military aviation tragedy.”
According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, a Su-34 aircraft crashed on October 17, 2022, while preparing for a training flight from a military base in the Southern Military District. The plane crashed inside the city of Yeysk.
‘According to the report of the ejected pilots, one of the engines was ignited before takeoff, causing the plane to crash.
At the crash site of the Su-34 in the courtyard of one of the residential areas, the aircraft’s fuel caught fire.
Aleksandr Kots, chief combat correspondent for the pro-Kremlin newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, identified the aircraft as a Su-34 from the 277th Bombardment Aviation Regiment.
Kots asserted that the predominant theory thus far is that birds entered the engines on takeoff.
Governor Kondratyev announced that all area emergency services were trying to extinguish the fire at the nine-story apartment building, to which firefighters, helicopters, and ambulances raced.
The blaze spread to several storeys. According to preliminary reports, seventeen apartments have been harmed,’ stated Kondratyev.
The investigative committee of Russia, which probes major crimes, stated that it had begun a criminal investigation into the crash.
According to local police, the enormous fire consumed multiple stories of an apartment complex and affected at least 15 units.
The airplane crashed into the apartment building in Yeysk, a vacation city in Crimea on the Sea of Azov.
A Russian Su-34 warplane crashed in Yeysk, Krasnodar area, near the Ukrainian border, igniting an apartment building fire.
Several storeys of the apartment complex were ablaze as massive flames tore through the residential structure.
The Su-34 bomber crashed into the apartment building in Yeysk, a vacation city on the Sea of Azov near Crimea, during a training flight.
The first through fifth floors of the nine-story apartment building were ablaze, according to eyewitnesses, and a report from the scene stated that emergency services were struggling to extinguish the flames that had spread throughout the building, a situation that was exacerbated by the aviation fuel that had been strewn across the crash site.
Local resident Oksana, who declined to provide her last name, stated that the area had been blocked off.
There may be an impending explosion. Everything is on fire within. “There is smoke,” she said to AFP. Obviously, I’m in shock. My child was at home by himself. She referred to Mariupol, the Ukrainian port city on the other side of the Sea of Azov that endured months of heavy bombing early in the war, when she remarked, “We used to go to sleep every night in fear since it is so close.”
Former Russian presidential candidate Ksenia Sobchak stated, “It is terrifying to contemplate how many people would perish.”
Just a few hundred miles across the border from Yeysk, Iranian kamikaze drones launched by Russia struck Kyiv this morning, causing greater fear among Ukrainian citizens.
Multiple waves of Shahed-136 drones – 28 in total – evaded air defences and slammed into the Ukrainian capital at 3.30 a.m. local time, triggering at least five explosions. Police and armed forces fired machine guns into the air in an attempt to bring them down.
One of the drones contained the inscription “for Belgorod,” a Russian city that serves as a staging base for weekend operations on Ukraine.
On Saturday, it was also the site of a gun attack on a military barracks in which at least 11 troops were slain by two conscripts.
One attack appeared to target the city’s heating network, as an operations center was struck.
Another vehicle crashed into a four-story residential building, ripping a massive hole in it and destroying at least three apartments.
There were three fatalities and 19 individuals were recovered from the wreckage, four of whom were injured. Searching for victims, rescue personnel scrambled over the wreckage from which gray smoke billowed.
Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal stated that airstrikes struck vital infrastructure in the Dnipro and Sumy districts in the center and north of Ukraine, killing’several’ persons and leaving hundreds of communities without electricity.
Sunday night, suicide drones also attacked the port city of Mykolaiv, setting fire to sunflower oil storage tanks.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine stated that the drone strikes were intended to “terrify the civilian population” but declared, “The adversary can target our cities, but it won’t break us.”
It comes a week after a massive barrage of Russian missiles and kamikaze drones manufactured by the Iranian government struck nearly every major Ukrainian city, damaging infrastructure and murdering civilians following the explosion on the Crimean Bridge.
Dense black smoke could be observed pouring from the crash scene. The number of casualties has not been determined as of yet.
The engine caught fire shortly after takeoff, and both crewmembers ejected and landed safely minutes before the crash.
Firefighters, helicopters, and ambulances rushed to the scene of the apartment building fire on the ninth story.
The Sukhoi Su-34 is a supersonic fighter-bomber aircraft manufactured in Russia. It is a fairly capable multirole jet that can be deployed as a bomber or for air-to-air combat, but it has a questionable safety record, with several training exercises resulting in accidents in recent years.
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