Fourteen people died on January 18 in a helicopter crash in Ukraine. The country’s interior minister is among the victims. An investigation has been opened to determine the causes of the crash.
In kyiv, Volodymyr Zelensky and Olena Zelenska, as well as members of the Ukrainian government paid their last respects on Saturday to the Minister of the Interior, Denys Monastyrsky, who died on Wednesday in a helicopter crash with 13 other people.
The aircraft had seven passengers, who worked at the Ministry of the Interior, and the crash claimed seven other victims, including a child.
President Zelensky and his wife Olena Zelenska arrived at the ceremony dressed in black, carrying bouquets of flowers, to comfort the families of the victims.
“Indescribable sadness covers the soul,” the president wrote in a message published Saturday on Telegram. “Ukraine is losing its best sons and daughters every day,” he added.
A “huge” loss
Inside the building where the ceremony took place, located very close to Maidan Square in the heart of kyiv, seven coffins were brought, carried by soldiers in ceremonial dress to the sound of a trumpet.
“They hadn’t been broken by the war and they didn’t allow anyone else to be broken apart from them,” the ceremony leader said, addressing hundreds of people.
At the end of the ceremony, an intelligence officer, Ilya Samoilenko, considered that the loss of these officials was “enormous”.
“We can take two days and mourn,” he said. “But we have to keep going. We have to move on.”
A “criminal investigation” into the crash
Ukraine’s president announced Wednesday evening that authorities had opened a “criminal investigation” into the crash.
“I instructed the head of the Security Service of Ukraine, in cooperation with all other authorized bodies, to clarify all the circumstances of the disaster,” he further specified.
Asked Thursday about the hypothesis of an accident, Zelensky replied that “several theories are being studied”. “I am not authorized to speak about the various hypotheses until the outcome of the investigations,” he added.
The helicopter, a Super Puma EC-225 (Airbus Helicopters) according to the State Service for Emergency Situations (SES) to which it belonged, crashed on Wednesday morning in Brovary, near kyiv.
