Ukrainian interior minister among 18 killed in Kyiv helicopter crash

Eighteen people, including Ukraine’s interior minister and three children, were killed when a helicopter crashed near a nursery school in Kyiv on Wednesday, officials said.

Oleksiy Kuleba, head of the Ukrainian capital’s regional administration, said on Telegram that 29 people had also been wounded, including 15 children, in the incident near a kindergarten and residential building in Brovary, an eastern suburb.

The helicopter belonged to the state emergency service of Ukraine.

Ihor Klymenko, chief of the national police, wrote on Facebook that the “leadership of the ministry of internal affairs died as a result” of the crash. He said that Denys Monastyrsky, the interior minister, as well as his deputy Yevhen Yenin and state secretary Yuriy Lubkovich, a senior ministry official, were also killed.

Klymenko said all nine people on board the helicopter when it crashed were among the dead.

Videos and photographs shared by Ukrainian authorities showed the smouldering wreckage of the helicopter near the entrance of a building and bodies on the ground nearby.

Emergency service workers are on the scene and the authorities have launched an investigation.

“The causes of the tragedy are being established by investigators. Whether it was sabotage, a technical malfunction, a violation of flight safety rules, we will soon find out,” said Anton Gerashchenko, an interior ministry adviser.

A lawyer by training, Monastyrsky, 42, was born in the western city of Khmelnytskyi. He was elected to parliament on the ticket of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Servant of the People party in 2019, before he was tapped to lead the interior ministry in July 2021.

He was a close ally of the president and made regular trips with Zelenskyy to visit Ukrainian troops on the front lines.