Senior Russian commander killed in March air crash, official says

A senior Russian air force commander was killed when a military transport aircraft crashed in Russian-controlled Crimea last week killing 30 people, according to a senior official cited by Russian media on Monday.



Alexander Otroshchenko, commander of the 45th Army of the Northern Fleet's Air Force and Air Defence, died in the crash, Andrei Chibis, governor of the northern Murmansk region where the fleet is based, was quoted as saying.



The An-26 military transport plane crashed into a cliff in Crimea on March 31. Russia's Defence Ministry said shortly afterwards that the preliminary cause was technical malfunction.



The An-26 has been in service since the late 1960s and has also been used by airlines to carry freight, but the model has been involved in a number of deadly crashes over the last decade.



A Ukrainian An-26 crashed during a flight in Ukraine's southeastern Zaporizhzhia region in 2022, killing one person. Another aircraft crashed on a training flight in northeastern Ukraine in 2020, killing all but one of the 27 people on board.