The Russian Plane Update

A plane of Russia with 65 prisoners of War were crashes Near Ukraine 

The plane was crashed yesterday in the Belgorod region of Russia which is the borders of Ukraine and Russia.A Russian IL-76, a heavy-lift military transport aircraft crashed with 65 Ukrainian Prisoners of War (POWs) in the Belgorod region of Russia, which borders the region. The POWs were being transported for an exchange in swap. Russia said there are no survivors in the plane crash.

A plane was crash, shot from a distance, showed the aircraft rapidly losing altitude and heading straight toward the ground, the IL-76 was out of the pilot's control and crashed near a residential area. The aircraft crashed on its right wing and was up in flames.

"About 11 am Moscow time (0800 GMT), an IL-76 aircraft crashed in the Belgorod region during a routine flight," AFP reported quoting Moscow's defence ministry as saying.

However, Russia has claimed that the plane was carrying POWs but AFP, quoting local media in Ukraine, reported that its defence forces downed the aircraft as it was carrying missiles for the S-300 surface-air defence system and not POWs. Russia's parliament speaker, Vyacheslav Volodin, has accused Kyiv of shooting down the plane carrying Prisoners of War.

The war in Ukraine has excavated Russia's confidence in its conventional forces and increased the importance to Moscow of non-strategic nuclear weapons (NSNWs) as a means of deterring and defeating NATO in a potential future conflict, a leading Western think-tank said.

NSNWs carry  all nuclear weapons with a range of up to 5,500 km (3,400 miles), starting with tactical arms designed for use on the battlefield - as opposed to longer-range strategic nuclear weapons that Russia or the US could use to strike each other's homeland.