[ad_1]
“It was like a video game”: this is how Vyachersalv Zolochevskyi, barely 20 years old, recounts his experience in the Ukrainian military plane that crashed this Friday in Chuhuiv, Ukraine. The young cadet was the sole survivor of the Antonov An-26 accident, which was carrying 20 more soldiers in training and seven crew members.
Apparently, and according to a preliminary investigation, “a failure in one of the aircraft’s engines” caused a fire. The burning plane crashed shortly after, with a violent explosion.
Zolochevskyi jumped out of the plane while still in the air and managed to save himself. After the explosion, he found a friend and partner in the army to be consumed by the flames and even saved him, pulling him out of the rubble. However, the rescued person would soon die with emergency services in place and would become the 25th fatality in the tragedy, which killed a total of 26 people. 28 people followed the aircraft, it remains to find one of the cadets who was on board and whose body has not yet been found.
According to the doctors, the surviving cadet is in “stable” condition and in recovery, despite having been unconscious for some time.
The young man’s mother confesses to the local press that she was in a panic and feared the worst when she received the news of the military plane crash. “When I heard about the disaster and read that it was a training flight for cadets, I didn’t know what to do, I panicked. I was afraid that my son was dead,” she says.
The president of Ukraine, Vladimir Zelensky, declared this Saturday a national mourning in memory of the victims. The Interior Minister explained that, according to the information already collected “it is impossible to pin down the exact cause that caused the engine failure and the plane crash.
[ad_2]
