The holiday spirit ended with a sudden crash on Jan. 8 — the one that killed 176 people aboard Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 shortly after takeoff near Tehran, Iran. The victims came from seven nations, including 11 Ukrainians.
It was the first fatal crash in the airline’s nearly 28-year history. This tragedy may come to symbolize the challenges and dangers confronting Ukraine in 2020.
The circumstances are suspicious. The Boeing 737–800 was only four years old, passed a mechanical inspection on Jan. 6 and has a highly reliable record of service. The crew was experienced. The weather was good. But the flight, scheduled to arrive in Kyiv Boryspil International Airport at 8 a. m. (Tehran is 90 minutes ahead of Kyiv), was delayed for an hour. The flight took place only four hours after Iran fired a barrage of missiles on military bases housing U.S. troops in Iraq, raising tensions.
Moreover, aviation experts quoted in the Western media said that engine failure is unlikely to have caused the plane to be engulfed in fire as quickly as video showed. Others noted that the widespread debris suggests that the plane was destroyed while in flight. The crew reported no problems before the plane abruptly stopped transmitting data within five minutes from takeoff as the plane rose to 2,400 meters.
A former U. S. Federal Aviation Administration accident investigation chief, Jeff Guzzetti, told the Washington Post that the crash carried “all the earmarks of an intentional act. I just know airplanes don’t come apart like that.” Todd Curtis, an aviation safety analyst for the website AirSafe.com, told the Washington Post: “The wreckage pattern was very consistent with a plane that was not intact when it hit the ground.”
And finally, late Kyiv time on Jan. 9, major U.S. news outlets quoted U.S. officials as saying that Iran did, indeed, down the plane with a surface-to-air missile. If proven true, the 176 people killed are the latest victims of the heightened tensions between the United States and Iran.
The reports are at odds with claims of Iranian authorities that the plane caught fire in the air for unknown reasons and that the pilots were trying to turn around and return to the airport. Iran blamed technical problems for the crash. Iranian investigators reported that the flight data recorder and a severely damaged cockpit voice recorder were recovered.
But the U.S. and other countries have banned flights over Iran precisely because of the danger that commercial aircraft will be mistaken for military planes, a danger that appears to have become all too real for the ill-fated PS752 passengers.
Iran has every reason to obstruct the investigation, if its forces accidentally or otherwise shot down the plane, perhaps fearing a U.S. retaliatory strike. The head of Iran’s Civil Aviation Organization said that Iran would not send the recorders to Boeing, the U.S. manufacturer of the jet, a standard procedure for investigations, experts say. The geopolitical conflict appears to preclude any form of cooperation between the two nations.
Ukraine has sadly experienced nations obstructing investigations. Russia’s shootdown of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 in July 2014, which killed 298 people, is a case in point. While a Russian Buk missile shot down the plane over Ukrainian territory, the Kremlin was in control of that area of the eastern Donbas. To this day, Russia has not been held to account.
International pressure must be exerted on Iran to prevent a cover-up. However, many Western nations have little leverage over the ayatollahs ruling Tehran. And, to be frank, Ukraine suffers from Western indifference. U. S. President Donald J. Trump, for instance, didn’t once mention the plane crash in Iran during his nationally televised remarks on Jan. 9 about his country’s standoff with Tehran.
Seeking justice here is not the only challenge facing Ukraine in the new year of the new decade. The nation still has a war to win, corruption to fight, rule of law to start, oligarchs to tame, an environment to clean up and an economy that needs to be unleashed to its fullest potential.
Reaching these goals will require the efforts of everyone in the nation and all of its friends around the world.
