Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has promised on the fifth anniversary of the Il-76 plane crash in Donbas that a priority in his work will be to establish the effective functioning of military justice.
“I, as the supreme commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, have instructed the chief of the General Staff to work actively on a systematic study of the combat experience gained from this and other tragedies, and to take it into account in further special operations and reform of the Ukrainian Armed Forces,” Zelensky wrote on his Facebook page on June 14.
He noted that he was aware of the litigation over the tragedy with the downed Il-76 aircraft and said that this testifies to major problems in the architecture of military justice.
“Establishing its effective functioning is one of the priorities for me,” he added.
Zelensky also said that the duty of Ukrainians to the dead is to prevent the recurrence of similar tragedies in the future.
“Today I came to honor the memory of each soldier who died on that day, June 14, for all the years of the war for independence and territorial integrity,” he wrote, listing the names of 54 Heroes.
An Il-76 military transport aircraft of the Ukrainian Air Force was shot down from an anti-aircraft missile system during a landing at the airfield in Luhansk in the early hours of June 14, 2014. There were 40 Ukrainian servicemen and nine crew members on board the aircraft. They all died.
The Security Service of Ukraine said that non-staff employees of the Russian military intelligence (GRU) from the so-called Wagner PMC shot down the airplane according to a decision made in the Kremlin.
