A Russian An-26 military transport aircraft has crashed in Crimea, killing all 29 people on board, according to information released by the country's defense ministry and cited by Russian state media. The victims include 23 passengers and six crew members, with no reports of survivors.
The incident occurred on March 31, when contact with the aircraft was lost at around 18:00 Moscow time while it was carrying out a scheduled flight over the Crimean Peninsula. Shortly afterwards, it was confirmed that the plane had gone down after hitting a cliff in the area.
Initial assessments suggest that a technical malfunction may have led to the crash, although no official detailed explanation has yet been provided. The defense ministry has not issued further comment beyond the preliminary information.
The An-26 is a Soviet-designed aircraft that has been in operation since the late 1960s and continues to be used for both military and cargo transport. However, it has a history of serious incidents in recent years. In 2022, a Ukrainian An-26 went down in the Zaporizhzhia Oblast during a technical flight, resulting in one fatality. A separate crash in 2020 during a training mission in northeastern Ukraine killed all but one of the 27 people on board.
Other accidents involving the same model include a 2020 crash in South Sudan that claimed eight lives, five of them Russian nationals, as well as a 2017 incident in Cote d?Ivoire, where four out of ten people on board died after the aircraft went down during landing.
