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“On the night of February 26, armed forces attacked the IL-76 MD military transport aircraft full of Russian occupation troops.”
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This was the message from the Ukrainian Air Force on one of the first days of the war. The plane is said to have been full of Russian paratroopers.
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But there is one problem: There are no public photos of the crashed plane or the dead soldiers anywhere.
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Ukraine says they inflict heavy losses on the enemy. Can we trust the numbers?
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The gap between the figures from the Ukrainian authorities and the verified losses is large. But that does not mean that the numbers are just lies.
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February 26 this year, a Ukrainian SU-27 fighter was on the wings. It took up the hunt for a Russian Ilyushin Il-76 transport plane.
The plane has room for between 126 and 225 soldiers. When the rockets from the fighter plane hit the transport plane, it was loaded with paratroopers, the Ukrainian air force reported.
A little later that day, another Russian Il-76 is said to have been shot down over Ukraine. US authorities with sources on the ground in Ukraine confirmed to the news agency AP one of the shootings on February 26.
Two months later we know that Russian forces have suffered heavy losses, both materially and measured in Russian soldiers.
But the two planes with all the paratroopers? No one has seen the remains of them yet.
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