Ukraine knew Flight 752 had been shot down, but it was careful not to antagonize Iran
Within hours of Iran’s stunning admission Saturday that its missile mistakenly shot down a Ukrainian passenger plane, Ukraine made a big reveal of its own. The country put out photos, taken a day earlier, showing wreckage riddled with small holes, suggesting damage from shrapnel.
Well before Iran admitted shooting down Ukrainian International Airlines Flight 752 outside Tehran on Wednesday, Ukraine realized the plane had been destroyed by a missile. But the country’s leaders tread a careful diplomatic path.
“The argument already didn’t exist for them to deny all this,” Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, told The Washington Post.
Soon after the plane went down, killing all 176 onboard, U.S. officials and the leaders of Canada and Britain told the world they believed the plane was likely shot down by Iran. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asked them to share their information with him, but held off announcing any of Ukraine’s conclusions – a strategic decision, Danilov said.
“We came to this conclusion before the Americans and Canadians,” he said.
Iran admits to downing airliner amid calls for justice, transparency
Ukraine wanted its investigators to gather hard evidence of their own, Danilov said. Officials were careful to avoid sharp criticism of Iran during this time to ensure its cooperation in the probe.
Zelensky, caught between the United States and Iran after a U.S. drone strike killed Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, the leader of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force, had the difficult task of securing the “cooperation of Western backers and Iran without being drawn into either side’s narrative of the Iran-U. S. conflict,” said Katharine Quinn-Judge, a Kyiv-based analyst for International Crisis Group.
Four days after the plane went down, Zelensky announced that he and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani had “agreed on full legal and technical cooperation, including compensation issues.”
“Once again, Zelensky walked a thin diplomatic balance beam and came out without falling flat on his face,” said Nina Jankowicz, a scholar at the Wilson Center. “For a political novice, he seems to have a keen sense of exactly how to appease opposing factions in order to protect Ukraine’s interests.”
After Iran air disaster, Ukraine’s president is again unwittingly entangled in an international rift
Ukraine has the kind of closure from Iran it still hasn’t received from Russia for the July 2014 downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. That plane was shot down by a missile launched from rebel territory in eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 onboard.
A team of investigators from Australia, Belgium, Malaysia, the Netherlands, and Ukraine identified a Russian military unit in charge of the antiaircraft missile system and has pursued prosecution of the Russian and Ukrainian citizens allegedly involved. Russia continues to deny any part in the incident.