A Russian Tu-22M3 strategic bomber aircraft crashed on Monday during a training flight in Siberia's Irkutsk region, the Russian Defense Ministry said, the Interfax news agency reported.
The ministry was cited as saying that the crew had managed to eject and had survived the incident.
Unverified footage of the crash, shared on social media, showed a plane nosediving into a thickly wooded area near the banks of the Angara River, producing a huge column of smoke.
Incident follows late March An-26 crash
On March 31, a Russian An-26 military transport plane crashed into a cliff in Crimea, killing 29 people on board, due to a possible technical malfunction, the ministry said on April 1, according to news agencies.
TASS news agency, quoting the ministry, said communication with the aircraft was lost at about 6 p.m. local time on a planned flight over Crimea. The peninsula, covered in sweeping mountains leading down to the coast of the Black Sea, was annexed by Russia from Ukraine in 2014.
"The defense ministry reported that a search team found the site of the catastrophe," TASS reported. "According to a report from the site, six crew members and 23 passengers on board were killed."
The ministry report did not say how many people were on board, but it made no mention of any survivors on the An-26, a light tactical military transport that has been a mainstay for decades and is capable of carrying cargo and up to 40 passengers over short and medium distances.
"There was no impact on the aircraft," TASS quoted the ministry as saying, implying that objects like missiles, drones, and birds were not involved.
"The preliminary cause of the crash is a technical malfunction. A commission from the military is working at the site," it said.
An-26 service, accident history
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 technical 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.
Eight people, including five Russians, were killed when an An-26 crashed in South Sudan in 2020. Four of 10 people on board were killed when an An-26 crashed on landing in the Ivory Coast in West Africa in 2017.