Ukraine’s interior minister and two other senior ministry officials were among 17 people killed on Jan. 18 when the helicopter on which the officials were traveling crashed near a kindergarten outside the capital of Kyiv, according to local authorities and other officials.
Officials said that four children were among the dead. The cause of the crash of the French-made Super Puma was unknown as of press time.
At least one nearby building was set ablaze by the crash, which reportedly left another 25 people, including several children, with injuries.
Local authorities have since confirmed that Interior Minister Denys Monastyrskyi, appointed by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in 2021, was among those who were killed. Yevhen Yenin, the minister’s first deputy, along with the ministry’s state secretary, also were killed in the crash, according to national police chief Ihor Klymenko.
“As a result of the crash in Brovary, the leadership of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine was killed,” Klymenko said, adding that the helicopter had belonged to the State Emergency Service of Ukraine.
A lawyer by trade, Monastyrskyi, 42, won a seat in Ukraine’s 2019 parliamentary election for Zelenskyy’s “Servant of the People” party.
He served as head of the Ukrainian Parliament’s Law Enforcement Committee before replacing Arsen Avakov as the interior minister following the latter’s resignation in July 2021.
Speaking on Twitter, UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman described Monastyrskyi as “a leading light in supporting the Ukrainian people during [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s illegal invasion.”
Cause Unknown
Ukrainian officials have declined to attribute the deadly helicopter crash to a Russian attack.“It’s too early to talk about causes,” Ukrainian Air Force spokesman Yuriy Ihnat said in televised comments.
The Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office has opened an investigation and said all possible causes were being considered. According to the spokesman, a probe could take weeks.
Russian Missile
Last week, at least 45 people were killed when a Russian missile struck an apartment building in Ukraine’s east-central city of Dnipro.While Kyiv and its allies condemned the incident, Russian officials say the missile was downed by Ukrainian air-defense systems deployed in the residential area.
“A Russian missile that targeted an energy facility was downed by Ukrainian air defense,” Vasily Nebenzya, Russia’s permanent representative to the UN, said on Jan. 17.
“Since the air-defense launcher was positioned in a residential quarter contrary to the norms of international humanitarian law ... the missile fell onto a residential building,” Nebenzya said at a session of the U.N. Security Council.
Drone Strikes
Since mid-October 2022, Russian forces have carried out frequent drone and artillery strikes on Ukrainian energy facilities across the country, including in and around the capital.Ukrainian officials have said that at least half of Ukraine’s total energy infrastructure has been damaged by repeated barrages, causing blackouts and widespread energy disruptions.
Kyiv and its allies say the Russian strikes are meant to ratchet up pressure on the civilian population and should therefore be viewed as “war crimes.”
Moscow says its forces use high-precision munitions to avoid civilian casualties and that the strikes serve a purely military purpose.
In September 2022, Moscow formally incorporated four regions of Ukraine into the Russian Federation after holding controversial referendums.
Ukraine and its Western backers staunchly reject the legitimacy of the move, which they say amounts to the illegal annexation of territory by Russia.
Encouraged by its powerful allies, Kyiv has vowed to recover the four lost territories, along with the Black Sea region of Crimea, which Russia similarly annexed in 2014.
