The January 18 helicopter crash that killed 14 in Brovary was probably due to bad weather and a convergence of wartime factors, reports the Ukrainian news outlet Strana.ua, citing sources in the Ministry of the Interior. Flying in the fog, with poor visibility, the pilot was late to notice a high-rise building, sources claim.
This information has not been officially confirmed.
The accident took the lives of several Ukrainian officials: Interior Minister Denys Monastyrsky, First Deputy Interior Minister Yevhen Yenin, and State Secretary Yury Lubkovich.
One of the journalists’ sources explained that the helicopter pilot chose to fly over Brovary for fear of a missile strike from the Belarus direction. At the same time, the radio-electronic suppression used by the Ukrainian armed forces disrupted the work of navigation tools. Sources have also mentioned that the pilot was flying too low, in poor visibility conditions, while the red lights on high-rise rooftops were out, due to power shortages. “At the critical moment,” one of them said,
when he was too close already, the pilot sited the building, but had no options for preventing the catastrophe. He tilted the helicopter abruptly, and it crashed onto the nearby daycare.