A helicopter crash in a suburb of Kyiv, Ukraine, killed 14 people, including Interior Affairs Minister Denys Monastyrsky, the country's highest-profile casualty since the start of the war.
The helicopter crashed early Wednesday in Brovary, a town east of Kyiv. It fell near a kindergarten and a residential building. One child was killed. All nine aboard the helicopter died, including Monastyrsky, Monastyrsky’s deputy minister, Yevhen Yenin, and Yuriy Lubkovych, the state secretary.
According to the state emergency service, 25 people were injured, including 11 children.
The deputy head of the presidential administration, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, said the minister was travelling to a war "hot spot." Volodymyr Tymoshko, head of police in the eastern city of Kharkiv, said in a Facebook post that he was due to meet the officials on board that day and talked with them before the flight.
A spokesperson for the Ukrainian Air Force, Yuriy Ihnat, said the helicopter was a Super Puma supplied by France. It belonged to Ukraine's state emergency service.
Monastyrskyy, 42, became interior minister in July 2021, maintaining security and emergency services and running the police. According to Tymoshenko, the interior ministry's work would not be affected by the deaths of its leadership. The head of Ukraine's national police force, Ihor Klymenko, has been appointed acting interior minister.
Officials gave no immediate account of the cause of the crash. Several videos show conditions were cloudy and misty. The helicopter was flying at low altitude, according to Andriy Nebytov, the head of police in the Kyiv region.
The state security service said in a post that its investigators were focusing on three possible causes for the crash: a violation of flight rules, a technical malfunction of the helicopter, or deliberate actions to destroy the vehicle.
The crash "is not an accident because it has been due to war and the war has many dimensions, not just on the battlefields – there are no accidents in wartime. These are all war results. ... Every death is a result of the war," Zelenskyy said to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday.
