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.”
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 on board.
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.
“When an airplane departed from a European capital five-plus years ago, Europe still hasn’t finished its investigation into this catastrophe and can’t say who’s guilty,” Danilov said. “In our case, a lot less time has passed in order to understand what happened.”
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A Ukrainian team of 45 experts and search-and-rescue personnel, including some who worked on the Malaysia Airlines case, arrived in Tehran early Thursday to investigate the cause of the Ukrainian International Airlines crash and identify the bodies. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Vadym Prystaiko told reporters Friday that “as it happens with these cases, the investigation team is not happy.”
“They want to have more access, they want to have more rapid access,” Prystaiko said. “They want to have more info, and so and so forth. Whether this is justified as the requests, that is very difficult to tell.”
Photos purported to be from the crash site posted on social media showed remnants of a missile from the Russian-made Tor air defense system, known in NATO parlance as the SA-15 Gauntlet. Russia has exported the surface-to-air missile system to several countries, including Iran in 2005. It’s designed to hit targets in the short to medium range.
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But among the challenges investigators faced was that the crash site was quickly cleared and bulldozed. Parts of the plane were taken to a nearby hangar. Ukraine didn’t get access to the black box until Friday. Prystaiko said investigators were examining pieces of the plane and the chemical residue on it, and were also at a hospital “analyzing the bodies of the people who perished in the crash.”
