A Russian military plane crashed adjacent to the building, setting it on fire, and thirteen people, including three children and three adults, perished as a result.
The Sukhoi 34 fighter-bomber crashed into the ground in front of an apartment complex on Monday night after taking off from an airstrip in the southern Russian city of Yeysk, close to the Ukrainian border. The aircraft had one engine on fire when it crashed.
13 individuals were killed in the subsequent fire, according to firefighters who spent the night putting out the flames. Another 68 people were evacuated from the block, and 19 of them needed medical attention for different injuries.
The video of one of the pilots laying on the ground nearby still linked to his parachute shows that both of them were able to successfully evacuate. The stranded pilot can be heard claiming the plane was shot down as others attempt to assist him. The Russian military said the troops were participating in training when the incident occurred.
For Putin’s struggling air force, which has already lost 10 non-combat aircraft since the conflict began, the accident is yet another humiliating defeat. In addition to failing to eliminate Ukraine’s far smaller air force, his pilots also failed to destroy Kyiv’s air defenses, and now they are only allowed to operate behind Russian borders.
The sound of explosions can be heard in the background of video showing the pilot laying on the ground, which has led to rumors on Russian social media that the jet was really performing a combat mission and munitions exploded after it crashed.
Veniamin Kondratyev, the governor of the Krasnodar area, refuted this, claiming that the explosions were really the sound of gasoline tanks exploding.
The fire was ultimately put out with the assistance of 410 firemen and emergency service professionals, according to the Russian website Zvezdanews.
Additional beds were being readied to welcome wounded citizens, according to deputy governor Anna Minkova, who also said that “specialists of the burn department from regional clinical hospitals have been deployed to Yeysk.”
Following being notified of the fire, Russian President Vladimir Putin issued an order directing that “all essential help” be provided to those injured in the military aviation accident, the Kremlin said the state-run news agency TASS.
The Su-34 aircraft crashed on October 17, 2022, while rising to conduct a training flight from the military airport of the Southern Military District, according to the Russian ministry of defense. Yeysk was the location of the airplane accident.
“According to the account of the ejected pilots, the activation of one of the engines during takeoff was the cause of the aircraft accident.
“The fuel of the aircraft burned at the location of the Su-34 crash in the courtyard of one of the residential quarters.”
Aleksandr Kots, chief combat journalist for the Kremlin-friendly Komsomolskaya Pravda, identified the aircraft as a Su-34 from the 277th Bombing Aviation Regiment of Russia.
According to Kots, the predominant theory at this point is that birds entered the engines after takeoff.
Governor Kondratyev said that all local emergency services were trying to put out the fire as firefighters, helicopters, and ambulances flocked to the site of the nine-floor apartment building.
“A few storeys were affected by the fire.” 17 apartments have been impacted, according to early information, Kondratyev added.
The inquiry into the incident has reportedly been launched by Russia’s investigative committee, which looks into major offenses.
According to local officials, at least 15 flats were impacted by the enormous fire that spread over multiple stories of an apartment complex.
Eyewitnesses reported that the first through fifth floors of the nine-story apartment building were set on fire. According to one report from the scene, emergency personnel were having difficulty putting out the flames that had spread throughout the building due to the aviation fuel that had been sprayed across the crash site.
The area was roped off, according to Oksana, a neighborhood resident who refused to disclose her last name.
‘An explosion might occur. Inside, everything is on fire. She told AFP that there was smoke. I’m clearly shocked. At home, my kid was by himself. Since Mariupol, a Ukrainian port city across the Sea of Azov, weathered months of intense bombing early in the conflict, we already used to go to sleep in terror every night, she added.
It’s frightening to consider how many people may die, said Ksenia Sobchak, a former candidate for president of Russia.
Civilians in Ukraine were once again terrorized today when Russian-launched kamikaze drones produced in Iran hit Kyiv only a few hundred kilometres over the border from Yeysk.
At least five explosions shook the Ukrainian capital beginning at 3.30 a.m. local time when 28 Shahed-136 drones in successive waves dove through air defenses and plowed into the city. Police and the military were forced to use machine guns to try to shoot the drones down.
For Belgorod, a Russian city that serves as a staging area for strikes on Ukraine, which was bombarded over the weekend, was written on one of the drones.
Additionally, two conscripts opened fire on a military barracks there on Saturday, killing at least 11 troops in the process.
One attack targeted an operations center and looked to be directed at the city’s heating system.
A four-story residential structure was struck by another vehicle, which tore a sizable hole in it and caused at least three units to collapse on top of one another.
19 individuals were pulled from the wreckage alive, however four of them were injured, leaving three dead. Rescue personnel rushed over the rubble where gray smoke was billowing while looking for casualties.
Then, in the north and center of Ukraine, in the Dnipro and Sumy regions, airstrikes struck vital infrastructure, killing “many” people and knocking out electricity in hundreds of towns, according to prime minister Denys Shmyhal.
Late Sunday night, suicide drones also targeted the port city of Mykolaiv, igniting storage tanks for sunflower oil.
The drone attacks, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, are intended to “terrify the civilian population,” but he pledged that “the adversary may target our cities, but it won’t be able to break us.”
It occurs a week after a bombing on the Crimean Bridge caused a massive barrage of Russian missiles and kamikaze drones produced in Iran to hit almost every major Ukrainian city, damaging infrastructure and murdering people.