KYIV – The downing of a Ukrainian International Airlines airliner in Iran on January 8 with the loss of 176 lives has continued to dominate domestic and international headlines.
On January 16, Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister François-Philippe Champagne chaired a gathering in London of a newly formed international coordination and response group that includes four other countries that lost citizens in the downing of UIA Flight 752: Ukraine, Sweden, Afghanistan and Britain. The group of grieving nations has drafted a framework for working with Iran on the disaster.
Apart from Iranian nationals, the largest group of foreigners on the doomed plane were Canadian citizens. Also killed were 11 Ukrainians, including nine crew members. Kyiv and Ottawa have been working very closely in the aftermath to develop the appropriate responses.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, together with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and other international leaders, has called for a complete and thorough probe of what occurred, and for Iran to assume full responsibility with all the legal and financial implications. Ukraine has asked for a formal apology and requested that Iran hand over the flight recorders; it is also awaiting repatriation of the victims’ remains.
Initially, it was unclear why the plane suddenly burst into flames and went down shortly after taking off from Tehran airport. Iranian authorities quickly blamed the crash on some sort of technical failure. Despite this occurring at a time of heightened tensions between Iran and the U.S., Tehran categorically ruled out the possibility that its air defense systems might have shot down the airliner. At first, the Ukrainian Embassy in Tehran also appeared to follow this line. There was also the possibility of a terrorist attack aboard the plane, or of a bomb being planted on it.
President Zelenskyy, who at the time was in Oman, also adopted a cautious tone. He called for patience until the reasons for the disaster became known, and urged all to refrain from speculation and finger pointing. Although immediately criticized by some at home for not taking a firmer stance vis a vis the Iranian authorities, especially as evidence began emerging indicating that Tehran had indeed brought the plane down, Mr. Zelenskyy diplomatically let other foreign leaders speak out and express their common suspicions.
The Ukrainian president evidently wanted to maintain a direct channel of communications between Kyiv and Tehran in order to secure access for Ukraine to the investigation, to the wreckage, black boxes and bodies of the victims, and in this way to be able to discover who or what was responsible for what had occurred.
Mr. Zelenskyy worked in close cooperation with Prime Minister Trudeau. The latter assumed the lead role in publicly voicing doubts about the explanation being offered by Tehran. The Canadian leader thereby took the pressure off the Ukrainian president in this tricky situation. Even U.S. President Donald Trump, whose country appeared to be on the brink of war with Iran at the time, refrained from accusing Tehran directly.
Under mounting international pressure, the Iranian authorities acceded to Kyiv’s insistence on allowing a team of Ukrainian experts to examine the crash site and wreckage. But Iran’s authorities also raised further concern by announcing that part of the flight recorders had been damaged and stressing that they would not in any circumstances hand them back to the U.S. company that had made the aircraft, Boeing.
Within days, the truth, or at least the essential part of it, became known. As more and more video, photographic and other evidence was published, and Kyiv itself shifted away from the initial statement made by its Embassy in Tehran, Iran acknowledged on January 11 that it had shot down the Ukrainian airliner as a result of “human error.”
Significantly, Iran’s ally Russia, who sold it TOR anti-aircraft systems and other weaponry, has been placed in a highly uncomfortable situation by Tehran’s reluctant admission that it shot down the Ukrainian plane. Various Russian politicians and TV personalities have suggested that it would have been better for Iran to have denied its responsibility. Moscow’s reluctance even today to admit that its missile brought down Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 in 2014 over the war-torn Donbas stands in stark contrast to Tehran’s behavior.
Once Iran admitted its responsibility, the messages emanating from within the Zelenskyy administration suggested that some Russian involvement in this case is not excluded.
“We think it was a Tor,” Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, said in an interview with The Globe and Mail from Kyiv on January 13. “We think the Russians will try and negotiate, and convince Iran to say that it was another type of rocket. We detect this effort already – to say that the rocket was produced in Iran… If we are talking about misinformation, the Russians are the most experienced.”
President Zelenskyy’s advisor handling relations with Moscow, Andriy Yermak, says that it cannot be ruled out at this stage that the airliner was shot down deliberately. He also points out that Iran owned up to what had happened “as a result of the prompt, professional and efficient work of the Ukrainian group in Tehran, which was also informed in detail and comprehensively by partners of Ukraine.”
There are other questions: Was the shootdown of the Ukrainian aircraft indeed a mistake, or was it deliberate? Why did Iran not stop international flights from and to Tehran airport at such a dangerous moment – when Iran’s air-defense forces were on high alert? Why was it that the Ukrainian aircraft was targeted from among the various flights leaving Tehran that morning? Who was responsible for firing the missiles? Were Russian military or technicians involved?
Observers are also asking what lessons about security concerns concerning international flights during moments of acute international tension will the international community learn.
In the meantime, the priorities, according to Ukraine’s Ambassador to Canada, Andriy Shevchenko, are the identification of bodies and delivering the remains to the families; getting to the truth in the investigation; and compensating the families and the Ukrainian carrier, UIA.
Ambassador Shevchenko explained that “Ukraine is in a special situation. In contrast to Canada, we have the Embassy in Tehran; our specialists are working there. In fact, we were for Canada the ears, eyes, hands, legs and sometimes the shoulder to cry on. They appreciate our help.”
The shootdown of the Ukraine airliner made it imperative for President Zelenskyy to have telephone discussions with a number of international leaders. In recent days, these have included the leaders of Canada, Britain, Germany and France, with whom broader themes pertaining to the Russian-Ukrainian war were involved; U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo; the European Union’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, Vice-President of the European Commission Josep Borrell; as well as the leaders of Afghanistan, Georgia and Iran.
Thus, Ukraine is not alone in responding to the downing of its airliner. The framework adopted at the January 16 meeting in London of the international group of five calls for an “independent criminal investigation, followed by transparent and impartial judicial proceedings.” To what extent Iran will be cooperative remains to be seen.