One year after the Iranian military downed a Ukraine International Airlines flight, killing all 176 passengers on board, the criminal investigation continues to drag on.
Tehran still hasn’t provided the victims’ families with any financial compensation. Nor has it imprisoned anyone responsible.
The heartbroken loved ones of the victims are left with little hope for justice.
“I want those who did this to be sentenced and not to three years suspended, as it is now being discussed in the media, but to get a life sentence in prison. That is my dream,” widowed husband Valeriy Gordyna told the Kyiv Post.
His wife Yulia Sologub, a 25-year-old flight attendant, was on the plane that departed from Tehran to Kyiv in the early hours of Jan. 8. Shortly after takeoff, the plane crashed after being hit by two missiles.
Read more: Who were the 11 Ukrainians killed in Iran plane crash?
Gordyna learned about the tragedy in the morning from his father who had seen the news about the plane crash on TV and immediately called him. Gordyna rushed to the airport in disbelief.
“I saw the information board there and then realized what happened. At the departure lounge the pilots and flight attendants who work on other flights were crying. I ran over to one of them and asked whether my Yulia was on that plane and she said yes, started crying and walked away,” he said.
Gordyna spent the whole day at the airport in tears, kissing a photo of his wife. They got married just a year and a half before the tragedy.
Valeriy Gordyna, a widowed husband of Yulia Sologub, a 25-year-old flight attendant killed on the Ukraine International Airlines flight PS752 departing from Tehran to Kyiv, cries at the Boryspil international airport outside Kyiv on Jan. 8, 2020. (Volodymyr Petrov)
The couple met at the Kyiv National Linguistic University where they both studied.
“For two years we lived together in student accommodations. Then we rented a flat and later bought our own,” Gordyna said.
“On January 7, we moved into the new apartment and on January 8, Yulia passed away,” he continued. “We had not even unpacked yet.”
The only thing Gordyna wants is justice for those who killed his wife.
“I don’t just want the authorities to jail the common soldiers and say ‘we sorted it out’, but those who made the decision” to fire the missiles, he said.
Ever since his wife died, he has barely been able to cope.
“You know, if you chop off both arms and both legs and damage the brain, a person will still live,” he said. “But what kind of life is that? She was everything. And now I am without her.”
One year later, no justice
Iranian authorities have been reluctant to take responsibility.
Shortly after the Ukrainian jet hit the ground in flames, Iranian authorities blamed a supposed aircraft malfunction.
The country’s officials had confidently claimed that the aircraft crashed due to an engine fire. Iranian experts reportedly bulldozed the crash site to hide evidence to the contrary. Their earliest reports tried to point to possible mechanical failures.
However, the crew never reported any problems until the final seconds. The jet had been carefully checked the day before the fatal flight.
Even before the crash site was properly inspected, Tehran firmly rejected the notion that the plane was downed by Iranian air defense amid a military stand-off with the United States. It was simply “not possible from a scientific point of view,” officials claimed on Jan. 9.
A smartphone video recorded by a witness helped set the facts straight. It showed a missile hitting the plane in the sky followed by an explosion. The New York Times obtained the video, verified it, and published it on the same day. Moreover, U.S. and other intelligence sources were also reporting that the plane was shot down.
It took Iran two days to admit guilt and offer apologies.
However, Iran proved to be slow to investigate the plane crash. It took the country’s authorities almost half a year to send the black boxes to France for expert analysis.
Black box data has confirmed that an Iranian air defense operator mistook the Ukrainian Boeing for an American cruise missile and pushed the button, destroying the plane and killing everyone on board.
From the Iranian perspective, this happened due to “bad communication” and “poor alignment” in the country’s most elite military force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Rescue teams work the crash site of a Ukrainian airliner on Jan. 8, 2020. The plane of Ukraine International Airline, the country’s largest airline, was downed by Iran near Imam Khomeini International Airport in Tehran shortly after takeoff. 176 people were killed, including 11 Ukrainians. (AFP)
Shortly after the attack, Iranian authorities claimed they had arrested six suspects, who may face three years in prison for killing 176 people.
Ukraine questioned the fairness of the sentence and began its own investigation. The Prosecutor General’s Office responsible for the probe regularly complains that its Iranian counterparts barely cooperate.
Five countries that lost their citizens in the tragedy – Ukraine, Canada, Sweden, Afghanistan, and the United Kingdom – created the International Coordination and Response Group to demand action from Iran.
At first, some praised Iran for its readiness to embrace the truth and resolve the situation with dignity.
But what followed Iran’s formal confession was something that Ukraine’s Deputy Foreign Minister Yevgeniy Yenin described as “the most complicated negotiations” of his 15-year career.
Iran’s broken promises
Despite promising justice and compensation, Tehran quickly gave up on these promises and stalled the negotiations, according to Ukrainian diplomats.
“We aim to establish the real causes of the tragedy and bring all those responsible to justice, regardless of their position,” Yenin told the Kyiv Post. “We regularly communicate with the relatives of the victims and for the vast majority of them the issue of justice is key.”
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zariff wrote on Twitter on Jan. 6 that “justice will be served.”
But for Ukraine, justice still seems far away.
According to Yenin, the two sides seemed to reach a breakthrough after the second round of negotiations concluded in October.
Iran made a number of promises, saying it would hand over the physical evidence of the crash, the final version of the technical report and proof of the suspects’ arrest to Ukraine. It also agreed to create a joint investigation team.
“As it turned out, the implementation of the agreements has stretched considerably over time,” Yenin said.
After at least five unsuccessful requests from Ukraine, Iran finally sent the official report of the tragedy to Kyiv on New Year’s Eve, months past the deadline it set for itself.
“Of course, we have some thoughts now that, perhaps, the Iranian side was just trying to win some extra time,” he added.
Tehran has also flip-flopped on the issue of compensation. In October, it agreed to pay an unspecified amount to the victims’ families.
However, on Dec. 9, Iranian officials withdrew an offer to pay 200 million euros in compensation, saying that the deceased passengers had life insurance policies from European companies.
On Dec. 30, Iranian news agency IRNA reported that the government was ready to pay $150,000 to each victim’s family.
“Perhaps this is a deliberate tactic of the Iranian side, aimed at testing reactions inside Iran and among its external partners,” Yenin said. “As of now, Ukraine has not received any official compensation offer from the Iranian side.”
“It seems that the Iranian side thinks that the issue is nearly sorted,” he added. “A reasonable question arises — will there be a situation tomorrow where we are asked ‘Did the downing actually happen?’”
Iran’s Azadi (Freedom) Tower is illuminated in honor of the victims of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752, in Tehran on Jan. 6, 2021. (AFP)
Ukraine faces three possible legal battlefields.
One option is to seek justice in Iranian courts. Another is to sue Iran in a universal jurisdiction such as the U.K. or Canada. In February, Canadian lawyers filed a lawsuit on behalf of the victims’ families, claiming 1 billion euros in compensation.
The third and the most effective option is negotiating with Iran directly, as Ukraine is doing now, Yenin said. Negotiations can take up to two years.
If bilateral talks with Iran reach a dead end, Ukraine will turn to the International Court of Justice.
Compensation
Despite Iran’s delay tactics, the victims’ families have received support from other sources.
Immediately after the crash, the Ukrainian government promised to provide each family of the Ukrainian victims with Hr 200,000 (about $7,060) in financial aid.
Widowed husband Gordyna said the help came quickly. He declined to discuss the figures but said that the Ukrainian government did everything it promised. UIA, as his wife’s employer, was also very helpful, he said.
“Apart from the financial help they (UIA) helped with the funeral and logistics, provided airplane tickets for all the relatives coming from Russia, Belarus, Turkey and all across Ukraine,” Gordyna said.
Honor guard soldiers carry the coffins of the 11 Ukrainians who died in a plane shot down by Iran on Jan. 8, Boryspil airport, near Kyiv, on Jan. 19, 2020. (Presidential Press service)
The largest amount came from an international insurance company.
However, no amount of money can diminish his grief.
“This money will not bring her back to me,” he said of his wife, Yulia.
“I go to the airport, to the memorial stone every two-three days. I visit her at the cemetery every day,” he said.
Turbulence for UIA
For Ukraine’s flagship airline, the crash was just the beginning of its darkest year.
One month after the tragedy, the company was hit by the COVID-19 lockdown.
Ukraine banned all international travel from March through May, when the pandemic reached the country. Later in the year, travel resumed but remained very limited.
The blow could not have come at a worse time. UIA already suffered financial problems since 2018, when it saw $100 million in net losses. With the arrival of the coronavirus crisis, the losses snowballed. In July, UIA reported $60 million in losses for the first half of 2020.
Colleagues of flight attendants and pilots killed in Ukraine plane crash in Iran on Jan. 8, 2020, attended a tribute ceremony at Kyiv’s Boryspil airport on Jan. 19, 2020. (Volodymyr Petrov)
At the beginning of 2020, the company’s 42 planes were making about 1,100 flights a week. As the pandemic grew, the airline was forced to cancel thousands of flights and refund $22 million to over 85,000 passengers. At the end of the year, UIA had a total of 1.7 million passengers compared to 8 million in 2019.
This resulted in sharp revenue drops and massive layoffs. The airline had to sack nearly half of its staff — 1,000 employees out of 2,560 — to “optimize” its work.
UIA also faced intense criticism for increasing prices for emergency flights a few days before the ban on international travel on March 16. CEO Yevgenii Dykhne blamed the airline’s artificial intelligence for setting the price automatically based on high demand.
Despite being the flagship airline, UIA saw no state support. Dykhne thinks the government is reluctant to help because UIA is co-owned by oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, who was accused of siphoning $5.5 billion from Ukraine’s largest bank, PrivatBank. Kolomoisky is battling the state in hundreds of court cases.
“There is no dialogue,” Dykhne said. “For some reason, the government believes that everything that’s done for aviation is done for Kolomoisky. Therefore, nothing happens.”
