Russian jets have crashed into apartment buildings twice in less than a week, highlighting Putin’s military struggles at home and abroad
- A Russian warplane crashed in Siberia on Sunday, killing both pilots.
- The crash was the second time in less than a week a Russian military aircraft slammed into a residential area, causing fatalities.
A Russian fighter jet crashed into an apartment building on Sunday in the Siberian city of Irkutsk, killing both pilots, Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry said. It’s the second time in less than a week that a Russian warplane crashed into a residential area, resulting in fatalities.
“The Su-30 crashed into a private wooden apartment building during a test flight,” the ministry said in a Sunday statement, adding that there were no civilian casualties. It said the crash caused a 2,150-square-foot-large fire, noting that “at the moment, open fire has been eliminated.”
Video footage that was published to Russian state media appears to show the warplane plummet in a nose dive before falling behind a row a trees, where it exploded in a massive fireball. A slightly longer video published to social media by a Ukrainian journalist also appears to capture the incident. Insider was unable to immediately verify the footage.
The deadly crash occurred in southern Russia’s Irkutsk, a city of just under 620,000 residents not far from the country’s border with Mongolia.
The Washington Post reported that local authorities declared a state of emergency in the district where the crash occurred, and Russia’s state-owned aerospace company United Aircraft Corporation will investigate the incident.
