Ukraine’s Interior Minister and Leadership Dies as Helicopter Crashes
For reasons that are still unknown, a Super Puma EC 225 helicopter, loaned to Kiev by France and belonging to the State Emergency Service of Ukraine (GSChS), crashed yesterday morning next to a nursery and a fourteen-storey apartment building in the town of Brovari, 25 kilometers northeast of Kiev. Fourteen people died. At first there was talk of 18 deaths, a figure that was corrected once the search work was finished.
The nine occupants of the aircraft, in which the dome of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine was traveling, perished in the accident, including Minister Denis Monastirsky; its first deputy minister, Yevgeny Enin; and his Secretary of State, Yuri Lubkovich. With them perished Monastirsky’s assistant, Tatiana Shutiak; its security chief, Mikhailo Pavlushko; the pilot, Konstantin Kovalenko; two more crew members and a photographer.
On land, there were five other victims, one of them, a child from the nursery. Rescue services reported 25 injured, of whom 22 had to be hospitalized, 11 of them minors. The device crashed in the small space between a kindergarten and a residential building, against which hot fragments of the ship impacted. Part of the kindergarten building was also seriously affected. According to local media, the helicopter caught fire in flight, causing the fire to spread quickly after falling. At that time the children of the educational center had to be evacuated.
According to Ukrainian Air Force spokesman Yuri Ignat, the aircraft “carried out a civil protection mission entrusted by the GSChS in one of the conflict zones.” The adviser to the Presidency, Kirilo Tymoshenko, said that he was heading to the front line while, according to the mayor of Kiev, Vitali Klichko, the destination was the house in the city of Dnipro where on Saturday a missile killed almost fifty neighbors.
Monastirsky, 42, a lawyer by profession, is the highest-ranking Ukrainian official to die since Russia began the invasion in February. He had been in office since July 2021, was active in the party of President Volodímir Zelenski, Servant of the People, was married and had two children. Igor Klimenko has been appointed to his post on an interim basis until the Rada (Parliament) ratifies him or another candidate. Klimenko has been Deputy Minister of Interior and Chief of the National Police.
An official version of the disaster has not yet been provided. According to Internal Ministry adviser Anton Gerashenko, “investigators will have to establish the detailed cause of the tragedy.” Zelenski has also announced the start of an investigation and the intelligence service, the SBU, as confirmed by the prosecutor general, Andriy Kostin, will take charge of the investigations. In his words, “the causes of the accident are still unclear. All hypotheses are studied.”
A neighbor of one of the nearby houses, quoted by Ukrainian Telegram channels, said that “the helicopter circled three times, then flew towards the central part, began to descend sharply, hit the ground, caught fire and that’s it.” No one saw that she might have been hit by a missile. A video from a security camera shows the aircraft moving in a straight line at high speed without any apparent problems shortly before the crash. The Russian agency TASS said that there was fog and that, when flying low to avoid being targeted by possible rocket fire, it had to hit the roof of a house. According to Ignat, speaking to television, “it is too early to talk about the causes of the disaster. Clarifying them could take several weeks. It will not be a matter of one or two days, the investigation of this type of accident takes some time. I think a state commission will be created with aviation specialists.” “It will have to be determined whether it was sabotage, technical failure or violation of flight safety rules. We will soon find out,” he said.
Condolences poured into Kiev on Wednesday from all corners of the world. From French President Emmanuel Macron to his European Council counterpart, Charles Michel, and ending with the president of NATO’s Military Committee, Rob Bauer. From Russia, however, President Vladimir Putin reiterated that in Kiev there is installed a “neo-Nazi regime” that his country will defeat “without a doubt”.